I recently picked up a Sony TSL-S9000L, and have been having a heck of a time getting it up and running. First it was the SCSI (an old ServeRAID 2 I’d picked up for $10) causing my linux box to not boot up (solved mysteriously by pulling components and recompiling the kernel), and now it’s trying to get the autoloader to work.

Now that I’ve been able to get it to boot successfully, it looks like the ServeRAID card is detected as /dev/sg0, and the tape drive is /dev/st0 – /dev/st7 (also /dev/nstX)…

• sony mt tsl – move to the next tape by sending the ‘offline’ command’. It works, but gosh-darnit, I wish I could get mtx to work
• Linux Reference: Tape Drives – this is a decent reference, an explanation of a big brother Sony TSL-SA500C
• Experts Exchange: Multiple tar backups on a tape device