Sony SDX460v and Linux or the sorry state of grphical linux tape backup solutions

After getting booting Linux from a RAID1 parition done, yesterday’s task was getting a SONY SDX-460v AIT-1 Streamer to work with Linux. The simple procedure of plugging the ATAPI streamer in, getting it detected as /dev/ht0 (as an ATAPI streamer in other words) and using it failed. The linux kernel reported something in the way of “MTIO methode 24 not supported”, the device was unreclaimable by other processes.

Using the streamer with scsi-ide IDE emulation brought some advantages (controlling and reading the tape with mt and sonytool worked), but still crashed hard as soon as real data transfer would take place. The real solution was disabling ata and enabling ide-scsi for my streamer device (which is /dev/hdb btw.) with the following linux kernel parameter: “ide=nodma hdb=ide-scsi”. Thanks sony for not stating that your device is real b0rken with enabled DMA.

I would also need a graphical tape restore frontend for this client. The main operator would be the secretary (as storing should be done automatically and hardware failure should be prevented by the RAID1 setup the main purpose of the backup tapes is restoring accidentically deleted data). There’s a complete lack of open source solutions in this area so my current solution is to purchase a copy of bru and Xbru for around $180 and use that. It’s a shame that there’s no graphical frontend to tar/mt/etc.

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