NWR04B Update and the Overland LoaderXpress

As I haven't written about the NWR04B in a while, I thought I'd mention that it's because I haven't done anything with it in a while. Part of it has just been buying a house, getting ready to move, pregnant wife, and so on. But I've also just put it aside for a while, as I wasn't making much progress on either writing to flash or getting all the ethernet ports working. I may take it up again later this year, but I suspect that the new kid and my wandering mind means it'll be a while, if ever, before I return to it.

In other news: Just got a new Overland LoaderXpress at work yesterday, and it's...interesting. Very simple machine once you take the cover off: a plastic tape magazine in the middle, a robot arm along the left, a double-height Ultrium 960 drive from HP at the back on the right, a power supply in the middle on the right, and the control board along the right-hand edge. That's pretty much it. (I may take pictures, 'cos I'm just that big a geek.)

There were a couple little blemishes: the cover had half-fallen off the tape drive and was lying at an angle; I had to push it back on. And the two screws that were holding the tape drive in place were loose and had to be screwed back on. I realize this is a budget jukebox, but it's still $8000 list. Oh, and their sales guy doesn't return calls. Weird.

Once I got the cover back on and put it in the server room, it wasn't too hard to get it hooked up. I made the mistake of not attaching a terminator before hooking up the SCSI cable -- don't do that! And I had to recompile the kernel (the backup box runs FreeBSD) to add the ch device. But once I got that figured out, getting Amanda to see it was as simple as telling it the changer device (/dev/ch0) and the changer script (chg-chio). Perfect!

One slight hiccup: Ulrium 3 drives will read Ultrium 1 tapes (of which we have, oh, 50), but will only write Ultrium 2 and 3 tapes. I didn't find this out 'til after I placed the order...my bad. This'll change my backup plans a bit, but it shouldn't be a big problem.