In message <20010130231526.A318@antioche.eu.org>, Manuel Bouyer writes:
>On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 10:54:57PM +0100, wojtek@wojtek.from.pl wrote:
>> i found rst0, nrst0, nst0, st0 for my DAT tape drive
>> first two i understand but what is buffered device for tape?
>
>All devices are buffered. nst0 and st0 are non-unmounting devices I think.
>Look at st(4).
>
>> 
>> could i newfs and mount it???
>> 
>
>No, this is not possible on sequencial devices.
>

Back in the mists of time (I mean *way* back), it was possible to mount 
block tape devices as read-only file systems.  They did have very long 
seek times, though, so this wasn't really recommended....  (There were 
some DEC tape drives where it was possible to rewrite a block in the 
middle of a file, and I think that those could be mounted read-write.)


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb