Tape drive securiry?

[De Clarke Sys Mgr]

We have a lot of people who like to use tape drives (I won't go into the
applications in grisly detail, let's just say that they like to sit and
spin tape interactively for hours at a time).  We have one tape drive on
our 4/280.  This is the problem:  U**x does not provide, as far as this
neophyte knows, an equivalent to the VMS ALLOCATE command, which allocates
a device to a user.

When B has mounted a tape on /dev/rmt*, if there's a write-ring in it, A
can write on it.  (A's tape was on there, but motionless, and B removed it
and put his/her own on;  it happens). Also, when A walks into the tape
drive area and retires cursing because the same tape has been on there for
three hours, A has no way of finding out whose that tape is, other than
performing neck exercises in a vain attempt to read the moving label.  A
would like to go and ask B exactly how long B plans to monopolize the
drive, but A has no idea who B is.  Under VMS you can get this info with a
SHOW DEV/FULL.

Now, all you U**x fans tell me there ain't nothing VMS can do that U**x
can't do (sometimes better);  and often enough you have been right.  How
do we solve this one?

Surely someone out there has written (so I don't have to) a "tape serving"
daemon that processes user requests for tape access, and returns nice
little messages like "Sorry, User Mumble already has the drive allocated".
With a little luck you even wrote it so it works from remote hosts (I can
dream can't I?)... Please send mail if you know where I can get even the
skeleton of such a daemon.  (PS merely changing owner of /dev/*mt* won't
make us happy -- too messy in the case of abnormal terminations)

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