While a host application is writing data to a tape, a tape command like mt is issued from another host to the same device using a device file without the no-rewind-on-close option. On close(), a rewind is sent to the drive between writes causing the tape to reposition to beginning of tape (BOT). The host that is writing has no knowledge that the tape was repositioned and it continues writing from BOT overwriting data previously written. Resolution: A new tunable called st_san_safe was added with a default state of disabled. When enabled, the tunable forces the stape driver to fail all opens to device files without the no-rewind-on-close option with the errno EINVAL. The stape driver will also log an entry into the syslog like the following: vmunix: SCSI TAPE: dev = 0xcd002000 Failed open - st_san_safe enabled When st_san_safe is enabled, mksf will not create new device files without the no-rewind-on-close option. The mksf command will fail with an error indicating an invalid option was provided in the command line arguments. With st_san_safe enabled, lssf will not fully decode the density attribute of a special device file.