Solaris Tape Drive Commands

Sun StorageTek SCSI Tape Drive

Another Solaris “F1” call (we use the term F1 for help-desk calls)

This time a user needed a file stored on the Solaris SPARC server from over a month ago.  That long ago requires archive tape (although on our newer ZFS installs we try to do file-level snapshots – sure wish this was the case here!)

So let’s just do a quick review of our Solaris tape drive commands (su to root first):

Rewinding a tape:

mt –f /dev/rmt/0 rewind

Retensioning a tape:

mt –f /dev/rmt/0 retension

Display the status of a tape drive:

mt –f /dev/rmt/0 status

It returns information about the tape, if it is loaded, offline, file count, blocks etc.

Good luck!
Mike