Configuring a Remote Tape Drive on HP-UX 10.2

Prepared by Peggy Bruehl 4/29/97

In HP-UX 10.2 you are allowed to use a remote 8mm or DAT tape drive to back up local files. You can use SAM to make these backups, or you can use your archive softare of choice (tar, dump, cpio, dd, etc.). However, you must configure your workstations to allow user root remote access to the tape drive.

For example, let's assume we have two HP workstations (or an HP workstation and another UNIX computer). On machine1 we have a tape drive, and on machine2 we do not. To set up the appropriate permissions, you must create a file called .rhosts in the home directory of user root on both machine1 and machine2. The .rhosts files must have read-only permissions (# chmod 400 .rhosts) and must belong to the user, which in this case is user root.

On machine1, the contents of the .rhosts file are:

machine1
machine2
on machine2, the contents of the .rhosts file are:
machine2
machine1
Once these files exist, and have the appropriate permissions, you can now use SAM or your backup tool of choice to access the tape drive on machine1 from machine2.


Thanks to Dan Collis, ESA at TBW, for testing this procedure