This manual aims to describe the procedure for installing and configuring a tapeautoloader device with Bacula software.

For the purposes of this manual we used 1/8 G2 Autoloader HP autoloaders. These are devices that simple change and label the tapes inside them. Each device can accommodate up to 8 tapes LTO-3, with capacity of 800-1600GB per tape. The autoloader is attached via iSCSI cable to the storage server. In our setups, this will be the server attached to the autoloader


Autoloader - it has pretty neat GUI interface accessible through a web browser. All you have to do is configure an IP address for the autoloader and access it through your browser. Configuration can be done from the buttons at the front panel of the autoloader. For more details, refer to its documentation.

Once you've attached the autoloader and the storage server's OS has been installed, make sure that you've loaded the sg driver

The kernel module is used for generic scsi devices and should recognize your autoloader. Once, loaded, the autoloader will as device at /dev/sg1 and the tape itself will be at /dev/st0.

You can verify the slot number positioning and the LUNs by:

cat /proc/scsi/scsi. It should list something like:

For the next steps make sure that you've install the mtx package from the RHEL repository. It's also used by Bacula to change the tapes during backups.

Bacula works with 3 agents:

1. Directory - the heart of the software, runs on any machine and manages the backups. If you have a management machine, you'd better put it there.
2. Storage daemon - runs on the storage server; needs to be installed on the machine to which the autoloader is attached
3. FD - client daemon - runs on the machines which will be backed up.

All of the 3 can run on the same machine, however, make sure that in none of the configuration you use 'localhost' as destination address. We'll talk about this in next manual Using Bacula with HP autoloaders | Installation