I too am the "proud" owner of an on-stream tape drive. I have tried a few times on a non-e-smith Redhat box to follow all the directions to get the kernel to re-compile to support the drive. There are some directions at:
http://www.linuxtapecert.org/di30_install.htmlI am a bit of a newbie at the internals of linux and have never gotten it to work.
What I have gathered from reading up on the issues involved is that support for the drive is present in the 2.3 and greater kernel. From what I gather, Redhat has never gone to 2.3. I think that they have a beta of "Fisher" which can be gotten from their FTP site. That is based on the 2.4 kernel, so I am assuming

that the support will be built in at that point. Maybe through a loadable module "ide-tape".
I guess you could say that I am patiently waiting for Redhat to support the drive and then I am going to also have to wait for e-smith to support the new release of Redhat.
Not an ideal situation, but e-smith does sooo many other things for me, that I am willing to wait for that. It also is a lesson to me to not always go for the cheapest hardware out there!!!!!
Hope this helps!!
-Dave