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

[Longman, Bill]

> 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.

You might also think about using a script to get at the tape (assuming all
the tape users are running their jobs on the local machine).

See man page for lockfile(1).

HTH,

Bill