I have discovered that Seagate distributes for free a multi-
platform tool that allows Low Level Formats (LLF) of SCSI drives
from within Linux and MicroSoft.  It offers a greater degree of
physical security than the SCSI BIOS tools in that a power
interruption will not corrupt the disk being formatted.  The tool
can be had at: http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

The Seagate ST318417N that I MPE/iX formatted and mounted on the
test 918LX yesterday has been transferred to our production server.
 The reboot of our production machine found the drive and mounted
it as a private volume without further ado.  I created a simple
account structure to hold the store to disc backups using:

:NEWACCT BACKUPS,MANAGER;PASS=XXXXXXX
:NEWACCT BACKUPS,MANAGER;ONVS=HAL_BKUP
:ALTACCT BACKUPS;HOMEVS=HAL_BKUP
:ALTUSER MANAGER.BACKUPS;PASS=XXXXXX
:NEWGROUP PUB.BACKUPS;ONVS=HAL_BKUP
:ALTGROUP PUB.BACKUPS;HOMEVS=HAL_BKUP
:NEWGROUP SYSTEM.BACKUPS
:NEWGROUP SYSTEM.BACKUPS;ONVS=HAL_BKUP
:ALTGROUP SYSTEM.BACKUPS;HOMEVS=HAL_BKUP
etc.

Manual STORE and RESTORE tests into and from the new drive and
account show everything working as expected.  The FTP transfer from
the HP3000 to the Linux based repository has been tested and works.
The last bits remaining is a live parallel test with out regular
backups and then configuring the cron jobs on the Linux box to do
compression and SSH transfer offsite.

I looked at the jazz udcs for private volume management but our
requirements are so slight and infrequent that installing and
configuring the tools is a greater effort than just doing it
directly as above.

Regards,
Jim

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James B. Byrne                Harte & Lyne Limited
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