Jon LaBadie <jon@j...> wrote:

Change that to a -c true/false, and it would be a winner. The
problem with that is that the various drives take various commands
to effect that, so it might be required to have a preset file,
built by the user, that contains the required command syntax to do
that to *his* drive. It would also require a bit of must read
documentation, and with some users, thats always going to be a
problem due to a general lack of RTFM. In particular the noobie is
going to be asking a lot of why can't amlabel just work, when in
fact it cannot find the syntax file the user hasn't generated.

Maybe Amanda should generally have a typedrive specification which
contains such information (similar to dumptypes, interfaces etc).

Kinda tough to do on a system such as mine which doesn't have
commands or calls to change compression settings. It is done
on the "open" call to the tape drive (and driver) by selecting
a device name. Like you call nst0 or st0 to select no/rewind.
How do you change that behavior after opening the drive?

what system is that? This to me isthe ideal way as you can simply
select the device with the behaviour yo want.

Of course that is also the reason I don't suffer from the change
upon read problem you have.

I wish the Linux SCSI tape river did that (or maybe it does and I
have not found it yet).

>> amtapetype from 2.4.4 does a write without a read (and will
>> detect hw compression if still on :-) ).

What does this portion of its report look like?

It prints two lines:

If the seconds are noticeably different, the tape compresses data..

An error message and exit. No report.