Hello all,

It seems that the amcheck manpage is presently a lie. It reads:

-w     Enables a DESTRUCTIVE check for write-protection  on  the  tape
              (which would otherwise cause the subsequent amdump to fail). If
              the tape is writable, this check causes all data after the tape
              label  to  be erased. If the label_new_tapes option is enabled,
              this check may ERASE any non-Amanda tape in the drive or chang-
              er. The check implies -t and is only made if the tape is other-
              wise correct.

The problem is that while this was probably true at some point in the past,
 it is not true today: amcheck -w just checks that you can open the device
 with O_WRONLY, and doesn't poke at it beyond that.

My understanding, however, is that merely opening the device is not
 sufficient to check for a write-protected tape on many operating systems, so
 I lobby to change this back to the original (documented) behavior, namely,
 rewriting the tape label.

Any thoughts, complaints, criticisms, etc., on this?

--Ian
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