After great pain, I have my SCSI Certance Ultrium 2 LTO tape drive working nicely (except that the driver still doesn't load automatically at boot time, but that's another story, er, thread, I mean). Here's the question at hand: without using the rather complex GUI tool that came with it (which doesn't want to accept the permanent license they finally sent me anyway [sheesh!]), I'm trying to figure out if there's any way to find out how much of the tape is filled up/how much is free.

I'm guessing I'm rather out of luck here, but I thought I'd ask. The thing is, the drive has hardware compression which seems to do some good, so I use it. So, I can't just add up the space in the files that comprise the tar archives that are on the tape. (But if someone knows a cool way to get the uncompressed size of a series of tar archives, I'd like to hear that. Short of getting really cute with Perl scripting or something of the like and using mt's status command to see when I'm at the end of the data and parsing the tar archive listings until I get to that point, I don't see any way to get the uncompressed total either.)

If anyone has any experience with this tape drive (or similar ones) and can suggest another utility besides the NetVault utility that comes with it that can give me an indication of how full a tape is, I'd be interested to hear about it. In particular, if there's a command line utility whose output I could email myself, that would be really slick.

Thanks for any suggestions!

John