[TriLUG] AIT autoloader

[Dan Monjar]

Steve Hoffman wrote:
> I have recently...acquired...an AIT autoloader (Sony TSL-A300C), from
> a company that has gone the way of the dodo.  It's a fairly nice unit
> that seems to play well with FC2 and I'm sure all *nix's.  My question
> is, does anyone know how to remotely change tapes with it?  The
> magazine has space for 4-25GB cassettes for a capacity of
> 200GB(compressed) but I don't know how to tell it to rotate the tape
> without pressing the "select" button then "enter" when I have
> highlighted the tape I want.  I can't imagine it can't be done, but
> I've never used a tape drive that held more then 1 tape....anyone have
> experience with these models?  Know of a good resource for them
> specifically with Linux?
> 
> Thanks,
> Steve

Have you installed the 'mt' tool set?  I don't know how to make it 
choose an arbitrary slot but with loaders that I have I'll just do 'mt 
offline' to force the drive to eject the tape and then the autoloader 
will load the next one in line.