Tape drives and protection of tapes (using tar)

[Holtman Jim]

> You need a utility for allocating (and deallocating) devices (should
> also work with any type of file).  When unallocated, the device would
> be owned by, say, "public".  The allocator would be set-UID "public"
> (set-UID "root" on non-AT&T systems) and would give the device to the
> requestor if someone else didn't already have it.
> 
> This is just the simplest sketch of what such a utility should do.
> I have complete design notes for a full system that handles daemon
> processes, failure to deassign upon logout, generic device classes,
> and sundry other considerations.  Unfortunately I never got around
> to implementing the design.  Some such utility should be standard.

If UNIX(tm) were really a user friendly system, it would support
`labeled' tapes and then you would have this problem. The system
would read the tape label before writing on it to ensure it really
was the one that was requested.