December 13, 2004

New tapes

We got new tapes for the tape library.

We got them without barcodes, so I had ordered some barcodes from SpectraLogic. Unfortunately, they sent barcodes for cleaning tapes (which would work fine, probably, but would confuse me — on the other hand, the library could decide that they were all cleaning tapes and not let me write to them). So I found GNU-barcode, which spits out pretty decent barcodes.

Facts about LTO barcodes:

  • LTO and DLT use code 39 for encoding barcodes.
  • The “L2” at the end is, in fact, part of the barcode (it designates the media).
  • Veritas tosses the first three digits of the barcode (unless I tell it otherwise), to give us a 6 digit media ID.

I munged the PS output of GNU-barcode from the default with the text below the code in an upward-indented area to the text above the code in something that’s more like the SpectraLogic labels. Applied them to the tapes, and they work fine.

Posted by Rowan Littell at December 13, 2004 05:14 PM