HOWTO Restore from an Arkeia tape without installing Arkeia

This article was first written in January 2006 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/323).

Sometimes, you will find useful not to have to install Arkeia on your machine (a Linux system) to restore an old tape. Here is how.

Insert the tape into your device and rewind it like this:

# mt -f /dev/st0 rewind

Get the first 64k of the tape as a C program called readarkeia

:

# dd if=/dev/st0 of=readarkeia.c bs=64k

Edit it (readarkeia.c of course), there are chances you’ll have to clean it up a bit.

Compile it like this:

# gcc readarkeia.c -o readarkeia

If it doesn’t work, try again with the -Wall option to gcc.

Extract all your data [1], for example like this:

# ./readarkeia xvf /dev/st0

---

[1] it works mostly like tar

Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS)

This article was first written in January 2006 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/322).

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) is meant to be a reference on how to manage a Unix filesystem or directory hierarchy.

It enables:

• software to predict the location of installed files and directories, and
• users to predict the location of installed files and directories.

Achieving this by:

• specifying guiding principles for each area of the filesystem,
• specifying the minimum files and directories required,
• enumerating exceptions to the principles, and
• enumerating specific cases where there has been historical conflict.