Time-stamp: <2004-12-01 21:26:55 gokieli>

Hints & Tips for the Use of

CASTOR project CASTOR in DELPHI DELPHI Collaboration

What is CTA ?

CTA stands for CERN Tape Archive, and has replaced CASTOR. It's a pure tape storage system, with restricted access, and not to be used directly by users.

What was CASTOR?

CASTOR is an implementation of a Managed Storage system, developed at CERN, which allows users to store and retrieve large files (please do not use it for files below ~20MB!). It presents you with a file name space, which means you can store and manage your own files. All DELPHI users have their own CASTOR home directory, with an associated environment variable 
$CASTOR_HOME = /castor/cern.ch/user/u/username
There is a pool of tapes behind this name space, to which your files are copied. All the administrative details of tape names, file sequences etc. are dealt with by the CASTOR software. For DELPHI, CASTOR is mainly used for archiving purpose, eg to keep a copy of the data on tape.

Basic usage

It is discouraged to use CASTOR. Please use EOS instead which is disk based. Please note that direct access to CASTOR via RFIO (via libshift.so) no longer works.
U. Schwickerath, Jan 30, 2022