On Tue, 13 Sep 2005, Matt Hyclak wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 03:41:34PM +0100, Rodrigo Ventura enlightened us:
> > tapecycle is the total number of tapes; only these tapes are rotated,
> > right?
> 
> Not exactly. tapecycle is the minimum number of tapes that will be used
> before any single tape can be overwritten. Many people have a tapecycle less
> than the total number of tapes so that if a tape happens to go bad, it
> doesn't hold everything up waiting for a new one.

Tapecycle is also the number of slots in the virtual tape changer if you use
vtapes. Actually that isn't completely correct neither, as I found out amtape
continues scanning after the last accessed tape, but it refuses to scan for
more than tapecycle tapes in one invocation.

I'd like to have tapecycle different from the number of slots in the virtual
tape changer, so I can move vtapes offline, like with a real changer.
Right now the workaround is to make the number of slots equal to tapecycle, but
this makes some assumptions I'd prefer not to make.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                                                Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert AT linux-m68k 
DOT org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                                            -- Linus Torvalds