Matthew Jacob writes:
> There is nothing in my suggesting that NDMP might be useful which would
> require any hardware changes. This is a data management protcol- not something
> put out by Exabyte to sell more changers.

Matt,
	you have my support if you want to provide ndmp support in NetBSD. 
This should allow easier use of products such as Veritas NetBackup,
Legato Networker, and Workstation Solutions Quick Restore to backup
NetBSD boxes without the need to have a NetBSD specific client (which
is what these products traditionally had to do, right?)

For the others: Supporting NDMP is orthogonal to dump; it's more a
control protocol in which software can control backup processes, tape
drives and tape libraries. IIRC, the backup software on admin host `a'
can (for example) ask host `d' to send a backup stream to host `t', and
on the control stream containing the filenames back to host `a'.
There's nothing stopping the backup stream from host `a' being a
native format like dump, and in fact, that's what NetApp does (one of
the vendors who started NDMP). See http://www.ndmp.org for more info.

Luke.