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.

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.

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.

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).