rw permissions for world on /dev/st0 - good advice?

[Rick_Thomas]

It depends on how much you trust your users...

If the tape drive is world-write, then anybody can write to it.  If you
trust your users to coordinate their usage so that nobody accidentally
over-writes somebody else's tape, then that's fine.

If your users aren't so well disciplined as that, then you are better
off restricting use of the tape drive to a small group of trusted
people.  You do that by making the tape drive read/write by owner
("root") and group (e.g. "tapeusers") and putting only the people who
must use the tape drive, and agree to play nice with it, in the group
"tapeusers" in the /etc/group file.

Hope this helps,

Rick