UNIX Sysadmin Resources – Disk & Tape Information
This content was originally created, collected, and maintained by Stokely Consulting.
As of May 2005, it is being hosted and maintained by Bill Bradford.
FAQs & Specs | Disk/RAID/SAN Vendors | Secure File Deletion | Disaster Recovery | Free Tools | Removeable Media (ZIP/JAZ/Syquest) | Disk Enclosures
SearchStorage.com is a storage-specific search engine, full of information. The site contains news, how-tos, advice, books, buyers’ guides, and live events.
Quantum Support has excellent information on connecting different SCSI devices to Suns. Don’t miss the Application Notes on their SCSI disk format parameters and connecting DLT to Suns, AIX, IRIX, and HP-UX.
comp.periphs.scsi FAQ from Gary Field’s SCSI Info Central also includes SCSI humor, good info on 68-to-50 adapter wiring problems, and mis-behaved SCSI devices.
Ultrix Disktabs
Hard Drive Arrays: Storage Mountain lists a large number of vendors who manufacture Enterprise, Raid, JBOD or Controller arrays, showing max size, disk types and controller interface.
Breece Hill Technologies, makers of DLT Libraries.
Compaq OpenVMS and Compaq Storage
EMC Corporation
Exabyte Corporation
Nexsan Technologies
RAIDZONE
RAIDWeb by Electronix
Storage Engine makes high performance, intelligent data storage solutions that aggregate and manage storage resources with SAN and/or NAS over IP.
Quantum Corporation and Quantum/ATL, makers of Automated tape libraries
Seagate Technology, Inc.
Sun Disk Supply Center is a Sun Microsystems reseller of new & used original disk drives & storage.
Synetic Inc. Canada and US distributor
transtec Computers Ltd. in Europe
U.S. Design Storage Solutions manufactures and markets high-capacity and high performance optical storage products for OpenVMS, UNIX, Windows NT, and Linux.
Winchester Systems
Xyratex
(Information and products to help you completely remove a file from media.)
Information:
Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory by Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland. This paper covers some of the methods available to recover erased data and presents schemes to make this recovery significantly more difficult.
Tools:
fwipe securely erases files and is immune to filenames containing spaces, carriage returns, dashes, or any other special characters. Free software.
Secure Delete is a set of three utilities to perform secure deletion of files, secure overwriting of the unused diskspace on the harddisk, and secure overwriting and cleaning of the swap filesystem. Free Software.
srm (secure rm) is a command-line compatible rm(1) which destroys file contents before unlinking. The goal is to provide drop in security for users who wish to prevent command line recovery of deleted information, even if the machine is compromised. Free Software.
TCT and unrm/lazarus tools to verify the deletion of files:
TCT (The Coroner’s Toolkit) home, Computer Forensic Analysis for information about TCT and the work of Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema, FAQ on unrm/lazarusbr>
(Companies who can recover information from damaged media)
DriveSavers Data Recovery is in Novato (Marin area) California, but the company has customers world-wide. Great tips and troubleshooting info on the Web page. Data Crisis Counselor on staff to help you calm down while the company recovers your data.
Adroit Data Recovery Centre recovers data for hard disks, tapes, RAID subsystems, ZIP data cartridges, flash cards and more in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, HongKong, Brunei and China.
CBL Data Recovery Technologies Inc. provides recovery services for disks and tapes for any operating system, and data conversion. Located in Canada, but offers service worldwide.
Eco Data Recovery provides data recovery service for personal computer and notebook hard disk drives, server drives, RAID, SAN, NAS, along with forensic services. Located in Palm Beach Gardens, FL.
eMag Solutions LLC provides recovery, conversion, migration and forensic software and services. They also have software products that allow mainframe to Unix migrations and conversions.
Flashback Data provides data recovery, restoration, computer forensics and media conversion services. Headquarters in Austin, Texas.
IntelliRecovery Data Recovery Specialists provides global data recovery services for hard disks, for any operating system. Offices in San Francisco and Hong Kong.
KÃœRT Computer – EDRS provides data recovery and protection services, software. Located in Budapest, Hungary.
Lazarus Data Recovery in San Francisco, CA.
Ontrack Data International provides data recovery, forensics, media/data conversion, cleanup and recovery software. Offices all over the world.
Renew Data provides disk and tape recovery, computer forensics, and media/data conversion. They recover files from your media or it’s free.
Vogon International recovers data from disk and tape, provides computer forensics, investigation and expert witnesses. Offices in UK, Germany and USA.
Free Tools:
scsiinfo, written by John DiMarco is great for debugging Sun SCSI device problems.
dio is a Solaris utility that monitors the I/O from any device on a Solaris machine. The device can be a disk partition, an entire disk, a metadevice created with Disk Suite or any other kind of I/O device. Practical uses include visualising the flow of data to and from a file system, performance checking a new disk configuration. GPL licensed, source and binaries freely available.
HA/FST Free high availability clustering software for Solaris. HA/FST works similar to other HA tools. Heartbeats sent across a private network are monitored. If these heartbeats fail and subsequent checks across the public network fail, then a failover can occur. Additionally, each application is monitored at configurable intervals for soundness. Application failovers can trigger a restart or a failover.
HFS Utilities for Unix Systems is free software which allows Unix machines to manipulate Macintosh Hierarchical File System format floppies, CD-ROMs or SCSI disks directly on Unix machines. Command-line, X-based and Tcl interfaces, C library interface.
Juke is free software for controlling tape, CD, and other media jukeboxes for data analysis, backups, etc. without human intervention. The “juke” package supports controlling multiple jukeboxes per host, multiple hosts per jukebox, etc. with control being shared over a network. Runs on AIX, IRIX, and SunOS systems as an RPC client, and on SunOS 5.x, IRIX 4.x IRIX 5.x and AIX 3.2* systems as an RPC server. Good Documentation and Tutorial also. Written by the folks at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Removeable Media – ZIP/JAZ/Syquest Drives:
Iomega Corporation, makers of the ZIP and JAZ Drives. Iomega Technical Support has some useful Unix-related How-Tos. Unfortunately, Iomega moved these files, so you’ll need to search for them: Install an Iomega Jaz Drive on a Sun, Install a Zip Drive on a Sun, Install JAZ using SCO Unix, and Install Zip using SCO Unix.
SYQT/Syquest Technology, Inc., makers of the EZFlyer, Syjet, EZ135, and other removeable media drives.
TransferPro for Unix, from Digital Instrumentation Technology, Inc. can move files to and from Mac, MS-DOS or Unix formatted cartridges and disks. Reads and writes any SCSI device and formats Iomega and SyQuest drives, Magneto-optical drices, floppy and floptical, CD-ROM. Command-line and GUI. Runs on IRIX 4-6, DG/UX, RS6000 and Apple AIX, Sun, Dec Alpha, HP-UX 10. Downloadable demo.
Using a Zip drive with Solaris 2.6 explains how to get the automounter to work with this media. Written by Rob Funk.
Zip Drive Basics for FreeBSD tells you how to use SCSI, IDE and parallel Zip drives.
ziptool for Solaris 2.x is a free utility to format and manage protection modes supported by the iomega ZIP100 and JAZ1GB drives under Solaris 2.x. Written by Andy Polyakov.
Adjile Systems
Caen Engineering, Inc.
Ci Design Company
CRU – Connector Resources Unlimited, Inc.