In previous two tutorials we managed to get Bacula Software installed on our system. If you have missed the two previous articles I recommend to pay a visit to them.

Using Bacula with HP autoloaders | Basics
Using Bacula with HP autoloaders | Installation

So our installation is now complete. The Bacula files will be located in /usr/local/bacula with the following directory structure:

Time to make some changes so the system is aware of the new installation:

a) edit /etc/man.config, add MANPATH /usr/local/bacula/man - to make the docs systemwide available
b) edit /etc/ld.so.conf, add /usr/local/bacula/lib and them run ldconfig to rebuild the cache
c) edit ~/.bashrc, add export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bacula/sbin and then run source ~/.bashrc to make the binaries system wide available
e) modify /etc/services

f) modify /etc/hosts or your dns zone if you are using a DNS server. All systems participating in the backups should be aware of each other by domain name.

Up to this point we are ready to do some testing on the tape device to prepare for production deployment.


a) Verify that the system recognizes the autoloader and the position of the tape cassettes in it.
Run mtx -f /dev/sg1 status. Output should be something like this:

The above shows us that we have 4 tape cassettes loaded in the autoloader, left magazine(count starts from left magazine, slot 1) and the cassette in slot 4 (left magazine, the one in the back of the autoloader) is loaded into slot 0. This means that we can write to it.

Here are some useful commands:

mt -f /dev/st0 rewind - rewind the cassette, this works just like the cassette in your ex-walkman :)
mt -f /dev/st0 weof - write EndOfFile marks at position 0 on the cassette
mt -f /dev/st0 status - check the status of the cassette.