TU58 emulator

Hi Everyone, I'm thinking of a way to move as many of the PDP11 systems I have into my attic office to a) get them going, and then b) run them occasionally. I've stripped the two low corporate racks to the chassis, and if I can find a helping hand, I'm sure I can get them into the attic, then put the tabletop of my electronics workbench on top of it (I'm a little short on space). I'm thinking of bolting two pieces of rack profile to one side of each rack, which would turn them into a single unit comprising three racks. That way, I should be able to mount 6 10.5" PDP's and 6 5.25" PDP's, and have them conveniently close to my oscilloscope and logic analyzer to work on them. Now for storage... I have some RL02 drives, but I'm a bit reluctant to drag those upstairs. I have Emulex scsi controllers for three of the PDP's (2 x UC18, 1 x UC08), but the rest is without mass storage. I read about the TU58 emulator that runs on Linux, and I'm thinking of putting a DECserver into the rack with the PDP11's, and use virtual TTY's on a Linux box that connect to the PDP11's over the DECserver, then run multiple instances of the emulator so each PDP has one or more emulated TU58's. I know the "real" TU58 tapes can hold something like 256K of data. Are the operating systems aware of this limit, or could you get by with emulating a larger tape? Thanks for any insight you may have to offer. Warnings like "That's a really bad idea, because..." are also very welcome. Cheers, Camiel