Tape drives and protection of tapes (using tar)

[Doug Gwyn <gwyn>]

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.