[Info-vax] MSL4048 and FC LT07

[George Cornelius]

In article <77cb6c03-baf1-42bc-a1eb-ca687f5e07da at googlegroups.com>, "pcoviello at gmail.com" <pcoviello at gmail.com> writes:
> On Tuesday, April 9, 2019 at 1:38:16 PM UTC-4, pcov... at gmail.com wrote:

[...]
>> and I may have found the answer I'm going to change it and see if that wo
>> rks...  it's currently drive 1 which is an LTO4 and I'm going to change it
>> to 2 the LTO7...

[...]
> that wasn't it either (sigh)

Sequential, automatic sounds familiar from long ago.  Before
we went with TAPESYS (or whatever DEC called their version of
it) we had a Fujitsu 3480-equivalent tape stacker and would have
operators preinitialize tapes with the ID's that would be
requested automatically by BACKUP (either the sequential
method of incrementing the final two digits of the volID
or the "random" method of supplying a list of ID's on the
command line, which it would then accept in any order).
This worked OK if the stacker was set to autoadvance but
was nothing near what a tape management tool would provide,
and if you wanted proper volID management you would want to
either rotate through a range of ID's that you kept
reassigning from, or arrange to continually advance into
new tape numbers in a reserved range.

Tools such as TAPESYS (and whatever DEC's version of it
was) turned out to have a function which could give your
DCL script control whenever a tape mount was requested
via OPCOM.  Never tried using it, say with DCSC, but,
in theory, you could do what TAPESYS did to mount the
next volume, although it would be tricky to initialize
a new reel or substitute a different ID than what
BACKUP was requesting.  Note that the a similar
result could be implemented via the ptd pseudoterminal
functionality.

George