I have an Overland LoaderXPress w/ 20 tape magazine on a RedHat 8.0 system. I've compiled and run MTX which works like a charm on the autoloader. I can load and unload tapes using my backup scripts. The problem I've run into is using MT tape device control commands. When I run mt -f /dev/st0 status half the command finishes then it just hangs. See below.

[root@whs1 backup]# mt -f /dev/st0 status
SCSI 2 tape drive:
File number=0, block number=0, partition=0.
Tape block size 512 bytes. Density code 0x31 (AIT-2).
Soft error count since last status=0
General status bits on (45010000):
BOT WR_PROT ONLINE IM_REP_EN

I want to use this to determine if I'm at the begining of the tape or not after loading it into the drive. This command makes the tape drive unavailable and I need to reset the autoloader and server.

From /var/log/messages :

Feb 1 08:24:42 whs1 kernel: scsi: device set offline - command error recover failed: host 0 channel 0 id 0 lun 0

From cat /pro/scsi/scsi

[root@whs1 backup]# cat /proc/scsi/scsi
Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: SONY Model: SDX-400C Rev: 0702
Type: Sequential-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 01 Lun: 00
Vendor: OVERLAND Model: LIBRARYPRO Rev: 0420
Type: Medium Changer ANSI SCSI revision: 02

Any suggestions about how to resolve this? The version of MT I have is mt-st v. 0.7 which is the stock version that comes with RedHat 8.0.