I need a SAS tape drive

I hadn't really been paying much attentions to my automated tape backups for a few weeks because it seemed to just work, but it seems my Alpha that hosts the tape drive isn't feeling well (again).

It appears it had, for a few weeks, successfully backed up itself and my Xen dom0, and then promptly crashed. Because of the way bacula works with regard to scheduled backups, it didn't notice the fault—bacula only schedules jobs in memory and if the director is reset (such as the system crashing in the middle of a job with a system fault in the PALcode) it will just think that everything is all right and forget subsequent jobs.

This isn't news to anyone I complain to because that alpha has developed some problems over the years. Don't get me wrong, it's a fine system; it's just that it's something like 25 years old and things that are thus aged don't always fire on all cylinders all the time.

Moreover, it also seems to be having some issue with the (Intel pro/100S) NIC in that it kept losing the network link causing backups to hang. In the process of fixing that little problem I tried switching from manual configuration to dhcpcd (the thing that NetBSD-8 and up now mandates for IPv6 autoconfiguration) and it really didn't handle that well at all. Why are we stuck with that garbage daemon?

In any event, powering it off and on again (natch!) and wiggling the ethernet cable seems to have fixed my woes for now and it's been backing up for a solid 6 hours at maximum speed. Just another 5 and it should be done with the data domU. Knock on wood.

Meanwhile I was again looking at auctions for external SAS enclosures since I now have the capability with the installation of the SAS Expander in bluegleam. This led me to looking some more at autoloaders. There are some question marks there, whether I can even make them work with my system setup (LSI MegaRAID hardware RAID card without any runtime configuration utilities, my DOM0 is NetBSD after all. Rumor has it that the Linux tools—might work with linux emulation— are junk too) Maybe just an external enclosure to begin with, I can swap tapes every now and then manually, LTO-4 drives are down to reasonable second-hand prices anyway and that's way above my backup needs for now.

While I'm thinking of shopping; a non-RAID SAS controller might be something to get too and switch to software RAID (or maybe ZFS?). It's not like the system hasn't got cpu cycles to spare. But that's a big project and also involves downtime. Wonder if you can get cheap SAS3 controllers that support 16 targets, everyone should be swapping to SAS4, right?

Oh well.

Staffan