eject command does not do anything on my Lenovo T61 if the tray is empty.

I searched a bit on the Internet and it seems itś a common problem, but I could not find a workaround.

I think it worked before on older versions of Fedora.

I don't like using the physical button of the CD drive because I use lots of different equipments and the CD eject button is in many different places. So I set the eject command as a shortcut on "ctrl F10" on all the systems in the office.
It works fine on that laptop when there is a cd in it. It fails when the drive is empty.

I reproduce same behaviour from the command line. And /var/log/messages does not report anything.

Has anybody an idea please?

I don't think its supposed to eject an empty tray which by defination has nothing to eject. You could try using the umount command with eject, but I doubt it will work. My DVD player does the same thing, won't open with the remote.