SCSI Media Changer and Backup Device Control System

mtx is a set of low level driver programs to control features of SCSI backup related devices such as autoloaders, tape changers, media jukeboxes, and tape drives. It can also report much data, including serial numbers, maximum block sizes, and TapeAlert(tm) messages that most modern tape drives implement (to tell you the exact reason why a backup or restore failed), as well as do raw SCSI READ and WRITE commands to tape drives (not important on Linux, but important on Solaris due to the fact that the Solaris tape driver supports none of the additional features of tape drives invented after 1988). mtx is designed to be a low level driver in a larger scripted backup solution, such as Amanda or BRU Professional. mtx is not supposed to itself be a high level interface to the SCSI devices that it controls.

This version has the following features:

Will deal with LARGE media libraries (over a hundred elements).
Supports multi-drive media changers such as the Exabyte 220 dual- drive tape library.
Supports the 'invert' bit for optical jukeboxes that need that in order to flip their media.
Supports the 'eepos' bits for libraries that need this to extend/retract their import/export tray.
Now supports import/export elements!
Reports volume tags (bar codes) and "alternate volume tags" (whatever those are!) for those tape libraries that support them.
Now runs under FreeBSD and at least Solaris 8.
Now has a 'man' page!
The actual SCSI manipulation has been separated out into a library, so that you can create your own "C" programs that manipulate SCSI media changers directly. (Please note: this is under GPL, so any such programs will have to be under GPL also).

This program supposedly supports FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, and IRIX. Tru64 Unix and VMS are probably irretrievably broken at this time. This program has been tested under FreeBSD, Solaris, and Linux, and there only with a limited set of hardware:

Seagate DDS-4 six-tape DAT loader
Exabyte EZ-17 seven-tape 8mm loader
Exabyte 220 21-tape dual-drive 8mm tape library.
Ecrix Autopack 15-tape and 30-tape dual-drive 8mm tape library.
HP SureStore DAT 40x6 6 tape DAT loader.

Source Code

The current source code is:

ftp://ftp.estinc.com/pub/unsupported/mtx-1.2.11.tar.gz

RPMs may be available from the following place:

RPMfind's 'mtx' page

A .spec file is now included in the 'mtx' distribution for building your own RPM's.

Note that RPMs are courtesy of Kenneth Porter, who should be contacted regarding rpm-related problems.

Leonard Zhubkoff's original (obsolete) source code is:

ftp://ftp.estinc.com/pub/unsupported/mtx-1.1.tar.gz

Always check the directory ftp://ftp.estinc.com/pub/unsupported/ before believing anything that you read here.

Known Bugs And Limitations

You may need to do a 'mt offline' (or equivalent for your OS) on the tape drive to eject the tape before you can issue the 'mtx unload' command. The Exabyte EZ-17 and 220 in particular will happily sit there snapping the robot arm's claws around thin air trying to grab a tape that's not there.
The 'next' command does not understand the 'invert' bit (i.e., does not recognize that for optical jukeboxes, the 'next' of side one is to unload, invert, and reload the same disk). It always advances to the next slot instead.
For some Linux distributions, you may need to re-compile the kernel to scan SCSI LUN's in order to detect the media changer. Check /proc/scsi/scsi to see what's going on.
If you try to unload a tape to its 'source' slot, and said slot is full, it will instead put the tape into the first empty slot. Unfortunately the list of empty slots is not updated between commands on the command line, so if you try to unload another drive to a full 'source' slot during the same invocation of 'mtx', it will try to unload to the same (no longer empty) slot and will urp with a SCSI error.
For big tape libraries (more than a couple dozen elements) this may set a big Allocation_Size in the SCSI command block for the REQUEST_ELEMENT_STATUS command. Some operating systems may not be able to handle this. Versions of Linux earlier than 2.2.6, in particular, may fail this request due to inability to find contiguous pages of memory for the SCSI transfer (later versions of Linux 'sg' device do scatter-gather so that this should no longer be a problem).
VMS and Tru64 support are probably irretrievably busted. The last time IRIX was tested was for mtx 1.2.10.
This program will only use the first arm of multiple-arm robots unless the robot re-maps all arms to one element ID.
It has been reported that this program works on Solaris 7 using the 'sst' driver, and may work on Solaris 8 using the 'sgen' driver. 'sst' can be gotten from the Amanda contrib directory at http://download.sourceforge.net/amanda.

Philosophy

The Unix philosophy is "many small tools chained together". mtx supplies those small tools so that you can create your own backup and recovery tools by chaining mtx pieces together, whether it be with /bin/sh, Perl, Python, or CAML.

Future

mtx 1.2 will continue to have enhancements done to its core functionality as long as there is demand.

mtx 2.0 is once again back into planning stages. The biggest change envisioned for mtx 2.0 is a major change in the way that it handles the low-level device interface to allow multiple interfaces. The main reason for this is to allow NDMP loader support (not that I have a NDMP loader at present, but the NDMP standard definitely allows for them to exist!). This should also make it possible to program a distributed backup system using mtx 2.0.

Some other things envisioned for mtx 2.0:

Make the output format even more shell-script friendly.
Better support for invertable media. In particular, 'next' in conjunction with the 'invert' bit should be able to issue the proper mode sense command to note what side is in the drive, and if it's side one, should be able to eject to its source slot then flip it and put side two into the drive.
Better support for import/export ports. This, alas, will require some research, since nobody seems to do import/export ports the same on any two libraries that they offer :-(.
Figure out some way to support multiple arms on libraries with more than one robot arm (currently the 2nd and subsequent arms are ignored).
Support the new 'sg' driver in the Linux 2.4 kernel, which will allow grabbing of sense data that currently gets munched in the 2.2 kernel.
A TCL/TK GUI for controlling tape libraries and possibly for controlling tape drives. Any volunteers to write this?!

Support

There is now a 'mtx' mailing list at http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=4626.
There is now a 'mtx' home page at http://mtx.sourceforge.net.
There is now a FAQ that is part of the source code. Please read the FAQ first.
Report problems to Eric Lee Green (eric@estinc.com). READ THE FAQ FIRST!