got a question for the sysadmins

[Uncle Jim]

On Tue, Dec 24, 2002 at 10:04:09AM -0600, DAVID KUCHARSKI wrote:
> 
> Recently had to rebuild from a drive failure in a SCO Unix box.  In the 
> last few weeks I've learned a bunch about how my tape drive works with 
> SCO.  In the process I added a NEW VXA tape drive to a LINUX box as 
> well.  I found that the SCO box uses a command called tape to CONTROL 
> the drive.  I can use
> #tape rewind or #tape amount etc to get all kinds of things to happen 
> regarding the scsi tape drive.
> 
> is there something similar in linux? I've tried tape with no luck.  Is 
> that an option that i'll need to add or what would anyone suggest.  If 
> I'm going to NEED to add something anyway, might as well get your 
> opinions now.  Something simple to use in case i die  and have to depend 
> on one of the non-technical people here to read written instructions  to 
> get a back up or recover from another fatal drive error.
> Dave
> The system is running REDHAT 7.1
> in case that matters.

The command is "mt".  It is in the "mt-st" package on RedHat 7.3.  From
the rpm -qi:

   Summary     : A tool for controlling tape drives.
   Description :
   The mt-st package contains the mt and stinit tape drive management
   programs. Mt (for magnetic tape drives) can control rewinding,
   ejecting, skipping files and blocks, and more. The stinit program is
   used to initialize SCSI magnetic tape drives at system startup.

-- 
Jim