
           Chapter 11. Printing of Labels
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Chapter 11. Printing of Labels


Stefan G. Weichinger

XML-conversion;Updates
AMANDA Core Team
<sgw@amanda.org>
Table of Contents


  The_New_Feature

  Labels_provided

  History

  How_it_works


Note

Refer to http://www.amanda.org/docs/labelprinting.html for the current version
of this document.

 The New Feature

AMANDA now has the ability to print postscript paper tape labels. The labels
have what machines, partitions, and the level of the dump the tape has on it.
This is achieved by adding the lbl-templ field to the tapetype definition.
Since the labels are specific to the type of tape you have, that seemed to most
logical place to add it.
You can also specify an alternate "printer" definition to print the label to
other than the system default printer.
If you don't add this line to your tapetype definition, AMANDA works as it
always has.

 Labels provided

The author has provided label templates for the following tape types. These are
pretty generic labels, and should be easy to customize for other tape types.
Others are encouraged to do so.

* Exabyte 8mm tapes
* DDS 4mm tapes
* DLT tapes (in progress).


 History

At the University of Colorado at Boulder, we used to use some dump scripts that
printed out paper tape labels that went with the tape. When we started using
AMANDA for our dumps, my boss insisted we still generate them, in case we
weren't able to access the AMANDA database. The thought was that as long as we
had an amrestore binary on a machine, we could just look at the label, grab the
tapes, and do the restore.
As a result of this we have had to hack this feature into every version of
AMANDA from 2.1.1 through 2.4.0-prerelease.
Our hope in adding this feature is that others find it as useful as we have.

 How it works

The majority of the changes are in reporter.c. Just as you might run the
reporter by itself to see what the report will (or did) look like with a
logfile. When the reporter prints out the report, the postscript label template
is copied, and the successful machines, partitions, and dump levels are
appended to this. The output either goes to /tmp/reporter.out.ps (when running
in testing mode) or through a pipe to the printer (default printer, if an
alternate "printer" is not specified).
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