sawyl | The problems of tape processing

Tape processing is a wretched thing. But it is particularly so on a system runing an obsolete version of a jumped up desktop OS developed by a group of users with little interest in tapes and limited access to large robotic libraries.

O for the days of Unicos and tpdaemon. Sure, it wasn't perfect — I can still remember as series of regular crashes caused by tape daemon crashing with a signal 11 — but it was a damn sight better than nothing. It provided so many nice features. It arbitrated access to a pool of drives, making it easy to share them between applications; it managed both the data path to the device and the control path to the robotics; it allowed the device and channel to be varied; and provided a easy way to monitor the status of each device.

If only Linux had something similar...