The physical connection between the ROBAR server and the archive system for controlling the robotics in the archive system is hardware-dependent:
Archive systems with a SCSI interface are connected via fibre channel (FC), see "Connections at the SCSI interface"
Archive systems with an ABBA interface have a TCP/IP connection, see "Connections at the ABBA interface"
robar_abba runs as a central process on the ROBAR server. It is started when a ROBAR-SV instance is started. Up to ten robar_abba processes per archive system can be started when using multiprocessing.
Each of these processes reads a message from the job file and then performs the actions associated with this message number. These are generally actions to be executed in the archive system, such as mounting a cartridge, or actions to be executed in the BS2000 system, such as responding to a message. The actions to be executed in the archive system are transferred to the archive system, executed there and acknowledged.
