Bugzilla Bug 217507

I would like to suggest a feature request where we can set the
"maxtapeblocksize" option when compiling amanda.

Addition of a configurable compile time variable such as
AMANDA_MAX_TAPE_BLOCK_SIZE would be handy.

Also, Amanda 2.6.0 is out :-)

Reproducible: Always

Additional info from here: 

http://www.amanda.org/docs/amanda.conf.5.html

Default: 32 kbytes. How much data will be written in each tape record expressed
in KiloBytes. The tape record size (= blocksize) can not be reduced below the
default 32 KBytes. The parameter blocksize can only be raised if Amanda was
compiled with the configure option --with-maxtapeblocksize=N set with "N"
greater than 32 during configure.

Created an attachment (id=149649) [details]
ebuild for 2.6.0, with configure-option "--with-maxtapeblocksize=4192"

See ebuild https://bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=149649&action=view for
Amanda 2.6.0, and with the raised maxtapeblocksize of 4192.

That's great work... thanks :-)

I've read that sometimes maxtapeblocksize could be set too larger for your
hardware to work with. If we default this to a number that is too large during
compile time then I guess some older kit may not work correctly and this could
cause more bug reports to come in. There have been reports about this via
Google where people have had problems with this value being too large :-(

Is it worth having the ebuild setting this option to a low default and then
allowing a user to grow it if required via a AMANDA_MAX_TAPE_BLOCK_KB
environment setting?

I guess we would add something like this into the amanda_variable_setup
section:

[ -z "${AMANDA_MAX_TAPE_BLOCK_KB}" ] && AMANDA_MAX_TAPE_BLOCK_KB=32

and then change the config section to:

myconf="${myconf} --with-maxtapeblocksize=${AMANDA_MAX_TAPE_BLOCK_KB}

This would allow people to set this to a different size depending on what
age/type of tape device they have :-)

Created an attachment (id=149653) [details]
updated ebuild with configurable environment setting variable

Richard, your ebuild brings more flexibility, thanks.
Just note that the compile-time-option "maxtapeblocksize" doesn't configure the
blocksize directly, but just the maximum value to be used. So users still can
set the blocksize within their tapetype inside of amanda.conf later, as long as
it is smaller than or equal to the value set with "--with-maxtapeblocksize". 

Fixed in r4, to 512kb.