[Gllug] flushing tape drive cache

[Ryan Cartwright]

Hi all,

we have sony AITi130 (ATAPI AIT-2) tape drives here and recently I had 
cause to retrieve something from a backup that was a couple of days old. 
All our backups use good old tar and gzip (keeps it simple not that much 
to backup really).

The problem is that the tape contents appear to be cached. This means 
that if I do `tar -ztvf /dev/tape` I get a list from last night's backup 
and not the one for the tape currently in the drive.

Any ideas how (without rebooting) I can flush the cache? I've spent the 
last hour Googling for this but can find no way to do it. Tried `mt -f 
/dev/tape status` only to be told "/dev/tape is not a character special 
file".
Incidentally /dev/tape is a symlink to /dev/hda (HDD's are SCSI). `mt -f 
/dev/hda status` gives similar response as for /dev/tape.

Cheers
Ryan
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