redhat man page for tapeinfo

TAPEINFO(1)						      General Commands Manual						       TAPEINFO(1)

NAME
       tapeinfo - report SCSI tape device info

SYNOPSIS
       tapeinfo -f <scsi-generic-device>

DESCRIPTION
       The  tapeinfo  command  reads  various information from SCSI tape drives that is not generally available via most vendors' tape drivers. It
       issues raw commands directly to the tape drive, using either the  operating  system's  SCSI  generic  device  (	e.g.  /dev/sg0	on  Linux,
       /dev/pass0 on FreeBSD) or the raw SCSI I/O ioctl on a tape device on some operating systems.

       One  good  time	to  use 'tapeinfo' is immediately after a tape i/o operation has failed. On tape drives that support HP's 'tapealert' API,
       'tapeinfo' will report a more exact description of what went wrong.

       Do be aware that 'tapeinfo' is not a substitute for your operating system's own 'mt' or similar tape driver control program. It is intended
       to supplement, not replace, programs like 'mt' that access your operating system's tape driver in order to report or set information.

OPTIONS
       The first argument, given following -f , is the SCSI generic device corresponding to your tape drive.  Consult your operating system's doc-
       umentation 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,
       "cat /proc/scsi/scsi" will tell you what SCSI devices you have.

BUGS AND LIMITATIONS
       This program has only been tested on Linux with a limited number of tape drives (HP DDS4, Seagate AIT).

AVAILABILITY
       tapeinfo  is  currently being maintained by Eric Lee Green <eric@badtux.org> formerly of Enhanced Software Technologies Inc. The 'mtx' home
       page is http://mtx.sourceforge.net and the actual code is currently available there and via CVS from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mtx/ .

SEE ALSO
       mt(1),mtx(1),scsitape(1)

								    TAPEINFO1.0 						       TAPEINFO(1)