loaderinfo (1) Linux Manual Page
loaderinfo – report SCSI tape device info
Synopsis
loaderinfo -f <scsi-generic-device>Description
The loaderinfo command reads various information from SCSI tape loaders. Its intended use is for high-level programs that are trying to decide what the capabilities of a device are. The following are printed:
- Element Address Assignment Page:
- This tells how many elements are in the loader, and what their raw hardware addresses are.
- Transport Geometry Descriptor Page:
- Will display whether media is invertible or not (usable with some optical jukeboxes for detirmining whether to "flip" media after writing to the first side).
- Device Capabilities Page
- Currently will only display whether we can transfer between slots (i.e. whether ‘mtx transfer’ works).
- Inquiry Page
- Aside from the normal inquiry info, will also print out whether we have a bar code reader (for loaders that support the Exabyte extension for reporting presense of said reader).
Options
The first argument, given following -f , is the SCSI generic device corresponding to your tape loader. Consult your operating system’s documentation for more information (for example, under Linux these are generally start at /dev/sg0 under FreeBSD these start at /dev/pass0).Under FreeBSD, ‘camcontrol devlist’ will tell you what SCSI devices you have, along with which ‘pass’ device controls them. Under Linux, "cat /proc/scsi/scsi" will tell you what SCSI devices you have. Under Solaris 8, find /devices -name ‘*changer*’ will display the device names for your attached changers. Make sure to configure your ‘sgen’ driver first.