[daip] adding DAT tape drive to AIPS

[Eric Greisen]

marrj at union.edu writes:
 > Hello,
 >     I am about to buy a DAT tape drive (HP DAT 40--compatible with DDS2,3,&4),
 > to put onto my AIPS (on a linux machine).  Before I order the tape drive,
 > though, I want to be sure that I'll be able to get AIPS to know of the new
 > tape drive without much difficulty.  Can you tell me if this will be easy for
 > me to do (I am not a good aips or linux manager)?  And, if so, can you direct
 > to me to where I would find instructions on how to do this?  (I started
 > thumbing through the AIPS info. online, but didn't find a quick reference to
 > adding tape drives to the system.)

I was going to suggest the AIPS Manager FAQ page but even it says
little:

Edit the file

$AIPS_ROOT/DA00/TPDEVS.LIST

A typical entry from our file is

ALCOR      /dev/nst0         Exabyte 8500 (dual density)
ALCOR      /dev/nst1         DAT

where ALCOR is the host name to which the tape device is attached.

The operating system tells AIPS software what type of device it is and
AIPS should be able to handle things just fine.  Of course, your Linux
must have the right driver for the device and that can sometimes be a
problem - Linux is often behind the development of new devices.

Eric Greisen