Subject:   -37- Why don't no-rewind tape devices always work in IRIX
                5.3/6.0.1?
Date: 14 Oct 1995 00:00:01 EST

  The tpsc (SCSI tape) driver is a dynamically loadable kernel module,
  so it (like all such modules) is automatically unloaded five minutes
  after last use. This means that if you wait five minutes between
  writes to a no-rewind tape device, the driver will unload and the
  kernel will forget that it's not supposed to rewind on the next write.

  Install patch 176 to get a tpsc driver which doesn't forget about not
  rewinding when it unloads. Alternatively, you can prevent the tpsc
  driver from unloading at all by adding an "N" to the field which
  contains "oscdR" in /var/sysgen/master.d/tpsc and rebuilding your
  kernel.  See also the mload(4) manpage.