Tape Host Info Globbing Situation There's a bunch of picky host specific details that are currently included in each of the tape definitions. We ought to be able to define these for each host (rather than for each tape drive) so that there's more info sharing. Implementation Rewrite read_config or whatever its name was) to recognize a "host" definition, which would include things like: mt status ok whether mt status reports the correct file position mt eom works whether mt eom works correctly and reliably backup path path to the backup stuff on this sort of host, eg /usr/local/nbackup/bin, used for finding dd and pmt os type some identifier for the OS of the remote system - eg, ultrix, sunos4 Change the tape definitions to include a host type entry, and eliminate the other gunk. It might be nice to extend this, so that we can say that host allosaur is type sunos4-a, with its backup programs in /usr/local/backup/bin, and change things so that this overrides the defaults when all-backups goes to run things on allosaur. Other Points There are several problems with the way that backup-* and do-backups work as things stand. These ought to use specific info about the remote tape host to find things like the path for the dd or mt commands, or to find the backup programs. In some cases, we want to use the type of the local and remote system to determine how best to run the archive program. For example, using Ultrix dump to dump to an Ultrix remote tape, we don't want to include the o option so that things will work most efficiently. Otherwise we do.