The CASPUR Tape Dispatcher is a stand-alone server process ("tapedispatcher") written in perl, and is fully site-independent. Systems that need access to the tape resources communicate with the server by means of the Tape Dispatcher API (supplied along with the server). By default the server is listening on the port 7800; the port number may be changed via the "-p" command line option.

The site-dependent part of the system consists of 3 components:

1. System-wide configuration file, /etc/sysconfig/tapedispatcher.conf, which describes all tape resources (drives and magnetic tapes) of the organization.

2. Current tape usage file ( /etc/sysconfig/tapedispatcher.usedtapes), which denotes the used tapes and is dynamically managed by the server process.

3. Tape mounter command (/bin/tapemounter), which each site provides in accordance with our specification.