[SGVLUG] Mondo backups on "mondo" tape drives

[Emerson, Tom]

OK, I managed to rearrange a few bits of hardware and dusted off a DLT drive I picked up a couple of years ago -- I can now back up 40GB to a single tape, but it seems that most of the "backup" scripts & utilities [supplied with SuSE nowadays] are geared towards writing on "dinky" CD-R/DVD-R media [dinky in comparison, of course ;) ]

Any suggestions for programs that "really do understand" that people might really use a tape drive, and it just might happen to have "sufficient" capacity to back up the world and then some on one "reel"?  (or even handle multiple reels without blinking?) Ironically, it seems that with the later version of SuSE, they've dropped most of the third-party / free programs and only have tar & star.  (notable by their absence are the programs "amanda" and "taper", and I'm sure if I go back to older versions I'll find other backup solutions as well...)

Equally ironic, SuSE's own Yast program has a "system backup" module that looks pretty good on the surface, but doesn't seem to "understand" that my system really does have a tape drive [I told it to write to the file "/dev/st0", and it created "/dev/01_st0.tar" as a physical file in the /dev hierarchy... go figure...]

I've used Arkiea in the past [with this tape drive, in fact], but while I suppose I could extract the "free" version from the redhat 5.x series of install disks (where I must have gotten it in the first place), I've since found out it has a HUGE security hole -- appearently the program doesn't authenticate the sender(*) (and runs as root), so if you find the arkiea network "client" on a system, you can claim to be a "server" and write any arbitrary file anywhere on the client system...

(*) "out of the box", that is -- it seems most people overlooked the fact that there is a security setting to turn on such authentication, but reviews indicate it may be difficult to actually implement...