Drive ownership
You need to be sure that tclientd on the remote system can read and write to
the real tape device. Here at UW, we do that by chowning the device to
the user. This is done by the 'tmr' (Tape Mount Request) system.
Rsh permissions
Tclient rsh's to the remote system to start tclientd, so you need .rhosts
files or the equivalent to allow that. The reason for this is that it
takes care of the authentication problem when we make our central drives
available to workstations on campus.
Mounting the tape
You need some way to cause the desired tape to be mounted. Here at the UW,
our tmr system requests the mount via the 'tpop' (TaPe OPerations) system,
which prompts the operator to mount the tapes on whichever system is
needed.
Software availability
The tmr and tpop systems are both available to anyone who is interested.
They both ought to be reasonably portable, except in their interactions
with 'tms' (Tape Management System'), which is our tape catalog
system. Tms is also available, but is probably a bigger porting job.