Installation

Prerequisites

Requirements for tape access

To access tapes, Phobos uses the Linear Tape File System tool, especially version >= 2.4.

Note: since LTFS 2.4, lin_tape driver is no longer needed to access tapes. LTFS now uses the standard linux tape driver (st).

On RHEL8/CentOS8

You can check the Ocean repository to download the RPM: https://ocean.eupex.eu

LTFS RPM can be found on IBM Fix Central: ltfs 2.4

From sources

You can also retrieve its sources on Github: https://github.com/LinearTapeFileSystem/ltfs

If you want to build RPMs from these sources, you can find packaging resources (i.e. spec file) for LTFS here: https://github.com/piste2750/rpm-ltfs

Database setup

As part of its internal functioning, Phobos uses a PostgreSQL database, specifically a version >= 9.4.

On RHEL8/CentOS8

For this distribution, the name of the PostgreSQL packages are different, you must install the following:

yum install postgresql-server postgresql-contrib

Then, you must initialize the postgresql directories:

postgresql-setup --initdb --unit postgresql 

Move the created configuration file to the PostgreSQL directory in /var/lib:

mv /tmp/pg_hba.conf /var/lib/pgsql/data/    

Modify the library configuration of your system to include PostgreSQL:

echo "/usr/lib64" > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/postgresql-pgdg-libs.conf             
echo "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" > /etc/profile           
ldconfig -v          

Start the database server:

systemctl start postgresql

Other platforms

For other platforms, check the PostgreSQL website to know how to install the database and start it.

Phobos installation

To install Phobos and its requirements, there are two ways, depending on the platform.

CentOS 8

Using the Ocean repository mentioned above (https://ocean.eupex.eu), you can download the Phobos RPM, then your package manager of choice. For instance, with yum:

yum localinstall phobos-*

Other platforms

For other platforms, you will have to compile the sources. To do this, check the Developer Quickstart to know the dependencies to retrieve and commands to execute.

However, Phobos has only been tested and used for the CentOS 7 and 8 distributions, so you may have to modify the configuration and packages.

Initialization

Finally, you must create a Phobos database and tables as postgres user (the password for SQL phobos user will be prompted for unless provided with -p):

sudo -u postgres phobos_db setup_db -s 

By default, the created database will have the name phobos. To change this, use the command but with a -d:

sudo -u postgres phobos_db setup_db -s -d "<other database name>"

When all of this is done, you are ready to use Phobos !