I used some of the material in the cd-burning howto to do this. Found the burner's location to be scd0 and and it's called cdrom1. So, I decide to try cdrecord -scanbus and was warned that the cd's capabilities page couldn't be found. I take it iomega did something like either not provide that information or put it on a different address. I haven't tried using mkisofs yet to burn a cd that's for a little later. I think the only program having as many command line switches as mkisofs would have to be kermit itself. It'll take me a little time to figure that out since I want to use the cd burner to make system backups. I had read from another howto file that the zip 650 usb drives are known to work provided the usb drivers can find the equipment and you have scsi_mod working on the system since these usb drives will emulate scsi drives. I was trying to mount that cd burner and it was doing some serious vibrating so I'm certain I'm able to talk to it now. I just hope the fact the capabilities page couldn't be gotten isn't going to come back and bite me. The whole ftape idea will take rebuilding the kernel to get up and running for my tape drive and I prefer to do that as infrequently as possible. As things stand I need to ask some security specialists about the kernel compile options found in security-howto since I don't know which ones and how many would be appropriate for a home system with two accounts on it would be.