Currently I am looking at ways to backup certain files on my sun box running solaris 8. I'm looking at either a tape drive or a different server. Problem is I am lost. Fist question, How to you make the os recognize a tape drive, rmt0. I have attached the drive but then I figure there must be something you have to enter to find it like a mount point or something, so how would I do that, to get the tape drive running so I could go a ufs dump to it. Second in order to access the other server without a password I understand I have to get rsh login working or running. How would I set that up so I could have a cron job automatically run every day to copy over certain files to the remote server. Any help would be great, thanks.

If you attach a device after the OS is installed you need to regenerate the contents of the /dev directory. cd / ; touch reconfigure ; shutdown -r now The first tape drive will probably show up as /dev/rmt/0n ufsdump -0uvf /dev/rmt/0n /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 tar cvf /dev/rmt/0n `find / -name "*.txt"` rsync gets my vote for copying files between servers, although if you set up authentication you can use rsh to write files to a remote tape drive.

ok so i just need to type in root, touch configure and then reboot the server. Is there anyway by chance of recognizing the tape drive without rebooting in solaris 8? Also how would i set up rsync or rsh?

I don't know how to escape the reboot in reconfiguring your devices. HP requires a kernel build and reboot. You can download the rsync package from www.sunfreeware.com. Have a look at http://rsync.samba.org for details about setting up the rsyncd.conf file and usage.

Try tar cvfb - 20 ./dir | rsh remote_host dd of=/dev/rmt/0 obs=20b or the gnu tar with remoter tar server

For online recognition (as root): $ devfsadm -v the you'll see the new add tape device and put in a tape in the tape drive try: $ mt stat -f /dev/rmt/0 it should give response.. If you want to use rsh you have too make .rhost files in ths system that is backuped. for preventing passwd auth... but you can ufsdump to dump your file system and ufsrestore.... see man-pages for more help.

Great, that worked. I was able to get in to find the tape drive without rebooting and now I'm running the backups. Thanks to both of you. You guys are great help.