Tape Drive queueing for Unix

[Ittai Hershman]

Over the past four years we have migrated from TOPS-20 to VMS to UNIX.
When we moved from TOPS to VMS we lost the ability to have a queue for
tape-mount requests.  And now, as we move from VMS to UNIX, we lose
the ability to have users allocate a tape-drive for the duration of a
session.

I am looking for a daemon/utility to let us do both.  In other words,
the daemon would have a lock on the tape-drive device and users could
queue up to "mount" the tape-drive.  The user would be given sole
access to the drive until he/she "dismounts" it.  Seems rather
obvious, and someone must have done this somewhere along the line.  It
would be even nicer if this were available for a distributed
environment using Sun RPC, and down the road, OSF DCE.

Thanx,
-Ittai