HP SureStore DAT24 SCSI Tape Drive and FreeNAS

[twillkickers]

I have connected an HP SureStore DAT24 tape drive to my FreeNAS build. In the terminal, I can see the drive without issue. When I use dmesg I get the following readout:

Code:

sa0 at ahc0 bus 0 scbus4 target 3 lun 0
sa0: <HP C1537A L907> Removable Sequential Access SCSI-2 device
sa0: 10.000MB/s transfers (10.000MHz, offset 32)
random: unblocking device.
Trying to mount root from zfs:freenas-boot/ROOT/11.2-U5 []...

However, if I try to import the drive through the webUI, sa0 does not show up as a drive I can use. Is there a way I can make the webUI read the device? Or is there a method I can use in the terminal? I'd like to list out the files on the tape and copy them to my HDD.

 

[c32767a]

Tape drives are generally not treated as random access block devices (with a couple esoteric exceptions) so you're not going to be able to treat your drive and tape like a disk. It is highly likely you will need a software tool to read the tape and extract whatever files are on it.

To do that, you really need to know how the files were written to your tape. That will dictate if (or how) it can be extracted on FreeNAS.

 

[twillkickers]

Tape drives are generally not treated as random access block devices (with a couple esoteric exceptions) so you're not going to be able to treat your drive and tape like a disk. It is highly likely you will need a software tool to read the tape and extract whatever files are on it.

To do that, you really need to know how the files were written to your tape. That will dictate if (or how) it can be extracted on FreeNAS.

I see. I believe the tape was written using the Windows backup utility. Is there any software that can read a Windows tape backup in FreeNAS/FreeBSD?

 

[c32767a]

I see. I believe the tape was written using the Windows backup utility. Is there any software that can read a Windows tape backup in FreeNAS/FreeBSD?

Unfortunately, that I can't answer. The data on the tape is simply a stream of bits, so you can read it using the dd utility. But figuring out how the files are encoded in that stream and how to extract them would be a project.. Google seems to point to some linux tools for this, but I suspect it'll be a scavenger hunt.. https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/18098/Reading-MTF-Backup-Files

You could also always just boot windows on a machine and connect the dat drive long enough to pull the data.

 

[twillkickers]

Having some trouble with DD, I typed in the following:

dd if=/dev/sa0 of=/mnt/FileServer/Storage/Backups/Tape/CADImage1.img

Output was this less than a second later:
0+3 records in 0+1 records out 240 bytes transferred in 0.053351 secs (4499 bytes/sec)

What might I be missing?

 

[c32767a]

Tape is linear. dd will read the tape until it hits an EOF marker, Then it will stop. To read other files, you have to position the tape to the beginning of the file so you can read it with dd.
Depending on how you access the tape drive, the tape drive may stay in that position, or rewind the tape to the beginning when dd closes the device. What you got is most likely some sort of identification element telling the backup software what comes next on the tape.

I suggest you start here:
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/el_GR.ISO8859-7/books/handbook/backups-tapebackups.html

If you get anything meaningful off the tape with dd, the next part is going to be figuring out what format the data is in. There may be folks on FreeBSD or Linux forums that can guide you to getting your data off your tape. It's been years since I had a tape drive connected to anything and I've never dealt with windows and tape drives, so I can't be much help with that.

 

[twillkickers]

Thank you! As I look more at the tapes I think they have VMS backups on them. I can't install "vmsbackup" on the main system, so I installed it to a jail. However, now I do not know how to get /dev/sa0 to show up on the jail. Do you have any advice on the best way to do this?

 

[c32767a]

Again, I haven't wrangled a tape drive in quite a while and I'm not really familiar with Jails in FreeNAS.
My guess would be that if passing through a tape drive to a jail is supported in FreeNAS, there's a configuration element somewhere to include the devices in the devfs.rules. You'll need make sure to include both the standard and no-rewind devices when you figure it out.

You might ask that question in the Jails section of the forum. You'll probably hit someone who knows how to make the drive work in a Jail.