Tape drives & Linux

[Brian Mayton]

I've been given a SCSI tape drive (one that originally came out of an Apple
server, I haven't opened up the box to figure out exactly what it is, yet, i
do know it accepts 4gig 120mm tapes and I have a couple of them) and I'd
like to get it to work with my YDL 2.3 server.  I did some quick searching
on the internet and got a basic idea of how tape drives work with Linux, but
haven't really figured it all out yet.

There has to be a website somewhere that explains how it all works, how to
copy to the drive and from it, as well as other tape drive functions.  Can
someone here point out such a site?  Is there a man page that explains it?

I connected through ssh to my primary server (at a remote location, when I
go to set it up, I want to know what I'm doing) and tried a few things, man
st brought up a manual page, and /sbin/insmod st didn't report any errors
(in otherwords, the st module seems to be installed) which makes sense,
since it had a big hard drive and it made sense to install everything.

My test machine (here in front of me now) that I have the tape drive plugged
into doesn't seem to have st, as man st and /sbin/insmod st don't work.
What packages do I need to install?

Again, if someone could point me to a site that explains all of this I would
greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,
Brian Mayton