[ILUG] tape drive

[Gary Mc Closkey]

Sorry - can't help on the hardware side, but as for software, /dev/st0, mt
and tar are your friends. Taking them in order:

* /dev/st0 is the default scsi tape unit. It also exists as /dev/nst0 . The
difference? st0 rewinds at the end of an operation, nst0 doesn't.
* mt is a tool for looking at the state of the tape unit (on-line, in-use,
etc.), moving the tape in the cartridge around - rewinding, fastforwarding,
etc. It's also used when you have multiple archives on a single tape and you
want to skip forward or back  N archives. See the man pages for more.
* tar - what can I say? Except if you aren't used to tape devices you'll
find it strange that archives on the tapes don't have file names. I.e. you
have an archive of files, the files have file names, but the archive has no
name itself. You can however assign a label to the archive. Again, see man
for more. Oh yeah - make sure you're using GNU tar - it avoids the leading
slash problem for restoring ...

Gary



----- Original Message -----
From: Vincent Cunniffe <vcunniff at arbgroup.com>

> Hi,
>
> I just acquired an AIWA TD-20001 internal SCSI tape drive, which I'm
> planning on running in my Linux server.
>
> However, first I need to find tapes for it, and then I need to get
> some reliable and useful software to drive it.