Those of you in the group "backup" have access to the 12Gb DAT drive.

Please join the backup user's mailing list for announcements and general
discussion:

http://lists.warhead.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/backups

The drive takes 125m DDS3 4mm DAT tapes, each of which will hold 12Gb.
Many manufacturers mislabel such tapes as being 24Gb-sized, assuming a 2:1
compressionn ratio.

The tape drive is st0, which can be accessed under a variety of names.
See the man page for "st" for more details.

The tape drive can be controlled with the "mt" command. See the man page
for details.

It is suggested that you run "dump" on your machine, using the rmt
protocol over SSH to access the tape drive on the rmt server. Under NetBSD this
is accomplished with a script along the lines of:

export RCMD_CMD=`which ssh`
mt -f alaric@rmt.warhead.org.uk:/dev/nrst0 rewind
dump -0u -B 12582912 /
mt -f alaric@rmt.warhead.org.uk:/dev/nrst0 rewind
mt -f alaric@rmt.warhead.org.uk:/dev/nrst0 offline

Note the "-B 12582912" flag to dump, which tells it the size of the tape;
a 12Gb cartridge is that many blocks in size. If you do not supply this
flag dump will assume some ancient tape size and keep telling you to insert
a new tape because the current one is full. 

Currently, rmt.warhead.org.uk is pain. If I move the tape drive to another
machine I will update the rmt CNAME to reflect this, and email you all
to remind you to remove the line referring to rmt.warhead.org.uk in your
~/.ssh/known_hosts file.