A magnetic tape drive controller ✨🍰✨

A Python module for controlling magnetic tape drives under Linux. The module can perform tape drive operation, just like mt variants (mt-st, mt-gnu, etc.) under Unix-like OSs. For example, a user can rewind, forward/backward space, erase the cartridge, and so on. The current implementation is just a wrapper of mt-gnu. In the future, we will move to communicate with Linux st driver directly via ioctl instead.

Usage

[TODO]

Prerequisites

1. Linux/Python 3
2. The current version is wrapping GNU tools. Make sure mt-gnu/mt-st/sg_logs is in your execution path.
3. Root privilege is necessary for operating a magnetic tape drive.
4. You will need either a real tape drive or use mhvtl as a simulate tape drive.

Install

1. $ cd [project_home]
2. $ pip install .

Tape Drive Configuration

1. You can find out what tape devices you have by this guide.
2. Ensuring that the tape modes are properly set by following commands: (Assume your tape drive is in /dev/nst0)
   • mt -f /dev/nst0 stoptions buffer-writes async-writes read-ahead
   • mt -f /dev/nst0 defblksize 0

Testing

1. You need either a real tape drive or mhvtl for simulation.
2. After tape drive is ready, update tape drive information in test/tape_conf.py
3. run test cases by $ make test