We are trying to upgrade all of our machines to 2.6.1. Presently we are
struggling with tape changer problems on the server, an Ubuntu 8.04 machine.

A bit of history here.
We have a somewaht different arrangement. We have a RAIT, one side of which
consists of 25 vtapes, the other side of which consists of a single LTO drive,
not a changer, just a plain single tape drive, not a changer. We have had
this working for several years now.

When we upgraded from 2.5.1p2 to 2.5.2p1, we had to copy the chg-multi script
from the 2.5.1p1 release into the new tree, as the newer script did not
work correctly. 

2.5.1p2 chg-multi does not work with 2.6.1. We have observed a couple of
things. First it seems that the tape handler that we were using, ammt from
the earlier amanda release is depricated. Since this mahcine is a Linux machine 
we are back to the bad old days of trying to figure out wheter to use mt-st or
gnu-mt, and I honestly cannot remember which one of those used to work. In 
addition, we seem to be having problems with some syntax in chg-multi. There 
are lines that look like this:

echo `_ '$var'` >> $logfile

I (nor my sh interperter) understand these. Looks to me like we are trying
to execute something called + which does not exist. 

So since we are no longer going to be able to use ammt, what commands can
we expect mt to be involed with & what are the expected returns. Cause both
versions of the Linux mt commands (gnu-mt & mt-st) available for Ubuntu
return something different for an, mt -f /dev/nst0 status than ammt -f
/dev/nst0 status (none of the three match results). We got past the syntax
problem after getting rid of all the '_ ' in chg-multi & then amcheck which
calls the changer script fails to be able to find a valid slot. We suspect
that this is because chg-multi expects different behavior from mt than 
it used to get from ammt. We tried forcing the existing, working 2.5.2p1,
that normally uses chg-multi from 2.5.1p2 and ammt to not find ammt & so
use the system mt. It reproduces the same error just described (confirmed
suspicion that Ubuntu gnu-mt & mt-st are incompatible with the changer
code)


-- 
One of the main causes of the fall of the roman empire was that, lacking
zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C
programs.