We have scsi exabyte drives connected to our SCO boxes. We have had problems with getting the tapes into the drives in a timely manner because they are at another location. Is there a way to check the drive to see if a tape has been inserted? We can do it with Solaris, but haven't found anything for SCO.
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tctl is not available and the mt command does not work. On our Solaris boxes, we can use mt with the status command to check the drive, but need something for our SCO boxes.
I'm not familiar with SCO either, just Solaris, HP and AIX. If you have mt available that would be good to use, but you probably don't want to rewind the tape (if you plan to store more than one image on a tape the rewind command will put it back to the beginning and your next write will overwrite what was on the tape). Try this syntax -- mt -f /dev/rmt/0n status, assuming /dev/rmt/0 is the location of your tape. The n is for no rewind and status gives you a simple three line status of the tape. If there is no tape then you will get an error when you run this command instead of a three line status output.
On SCO systems the "tape" command replaces "mt". I use "tape status" in scripts and grep the output (silently) to check tape status. A while loop is good for this if you need to wait until a tape is loaded.
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Check drive for tapes