loaderinfo - report SCSI tape device info
Contents
Availability
loaderinfo is currently being maintained by Robert Nelson <robertnelson@users.sourceforge.net> as part of the 'mtx' suite of programs. The 'mtx' home page is http://mtx.sourceforge.net and the actual code is currently available there and via SVN from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mtx.
Bugs And Limitations
This program has only been tested on Linux with a limited number of loaders (Ecrix Autopack, Exabyte 220,
IBM TS3100).
Description
The loaderinfo command reads various information from SCSI tape loaders. Its intended use is for high-
level programs that are trying to decide what the capabilities of a device are.
The following are printed:
ElementAddressAssignmentPage:
This tells how many elements are in the loader, and what their raw hardware addresses are.
TransportGeometryDescriptorPage:
Will display whether media is invertible or not (usable with some optical jukeboxes for
detirmining whether to "flip" media after writing to the first side).
DeviceCapabilitiesPage
Currently will only display whether we can transfer between slots (i.e. whether 'mtx transfer'
works).
InquiryPage
Aside from the normal inquiry info, will also print out whether we have a bar code reader (for
loaders that support the Exabyte extension for reporting presence of said reader).
Name
loaderinfo - report SCSI tape device info
Options
The first argument, given following -f , is the SCSI generic device corresponding to your tape loader.
Consult your operating system's documentation for more information (for example, under Linux these are
generally start at /dev/sg0 under FreeBSD these start at /dev/pass0).
Under FreeBSD, 'camcontrol devlist' will tell you what SCSI devices you have, along with which 'pass'
device controls them. Under Linux, the command lsscsi--generic will tell you what SCSI devices you have.
Under Solaris 8, find/devices-name'*changer*' will display the device names for your attached
changers. Make sure to configure your 'sgen' driver first.
See Also
mt(1),tapeinfo(1),mtx(1) LOADERINFO1.0 LOADERINFO(1)
Synopsis
loaderinfo -f <scsi-generic-device>
