amvault Confusion

[GJW]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone could clear up some confusion over the use of amvault...

Firstly, how can I match up the barcodes on my tertiary media (physical tapes in a library) with the generated label from amvault, i.e. I would rather have amvault use the barcode than generate it's own so that it makes it easier to locate a tape, The man pages suggest that the autolabel option behaves the same as it does in amanda.conf so I would expect to be able to do:

amvault --latest-fulls --autolabel "$b" any --label-template "AM%%%%" --dst-changer "ml6000" Daily

But it looks as though the 'string' parameter isn't accepted by amvault.

Secondly, how does amvault overwrite old tapes, i.e. retention period? Will it simply use the settings specified in the amanda.conf file of the config I am 'vaulting'? (basically we rotate off site tapes every 8 weeks).

Thanks in advance!

[GJW]

I might have made some progress on this but I'm not sure whether I'm dissapearing down a rabbit hole or not, so any feedback would be appreciated....

My theroy was that if I didn't use the '--autolabel' option in amvault and labelled my tertiary media manually (to match up the labels to the barcodes) it wouldn't subsequently trample over the label.

However, because my 'Daily' config file specifies labelstr "^AM[0-9]+$" I can't re-use the same labels on the tertiary media using amlabel (it complains that it is already assigned to a volume), so I decided the best option to acheive what I want was to use a different labelstr for the tertiary media, i.e. use AM%%%% for the secondary (vtapes) and IM%%%% for the tertiary (physical tapes).

So I did this:

amlabel Daily -f -otpchanger=ml6000 -olabelstr="^IM[0-9]+$" IM000# slot #

I can now run:

amvault -olabelstr="^IM[0-9]+$" --latest-fulls --label-template "IM%%%%" --dst-changer "ml6000" Daily

Which seems to work, and I'm hoping that without the '--autolabel' option amvault won't trample over the labels I set up using amlabel.

This all seems like a lot of faff though just to make sure the barcodes match the Amanda labels!

[GJW]

Duh - I suppose I could just change labelstr in amanda.conf to:

labelstr "^(AM|IM)[0-9]+$"

[martineau]

amvault --latest-fulls --autolabel "$b" any --label-template "AM%%%%" --dst-changer "ml6000" Daily

You want the label to be the barcode or "AM%%%%"?

man amvault

--autolabel [any] [other-config] [non-amanda] [volume-error] [empty]
Works just like the autolabel parameter in amanda.conf(5), and can
be specified multiple times if necessary. The default is 'empty'.

--label-template label-template
Specifies a label template which is used to generate new labels for
tertiary volumes.

The amanda.conf autolabel is split into two arguments.

You probably do not want to specify --autolabel, but want a --label-template of 'AM-$b' and a labelstr of 'AM-.*'
You should make the labelstr more specific for the barcode your are using.