[ale] Cron scripts and ttys

[John Wells]

Geoffrey said:
> How would you handle this anyway?  I mean, if you want to be prompted to
> swap tapes, someone will have to be there to swap the tapes, so why not
> simply have them run the job at the right time.
>
> I'm not sure what this would gain you if you sent a message to the
> console that needed to be responded to anyway.

A number of reasons. The backup routine will not always require two tapes,
depending on what day of the billing cycle it is.  The backup must take
advantage of a late night down period when a small amount of users are in
the system, hence the cron job.  The backup routine is also consistent
across 5 different locations, and subset of which will not require two
tapes on any day for some time....but when they do we'd like to be able to
regain control of the script to interact.

Most important reason....to satisfy my curiosity :).  It was a question I
honestly couldn't answer.

Thanks,
John