[plug] debian 3.0, scsi tape drive, "no such device"

[dsbrown at cyllene.uwa.edu.au]

Dear PLUG list members,

The following Used To Work (tm) but either my memory for how to drive it is
worse than I thought, there has been some upgrade that broke things or I have
faulty hardware (in that order of reasonableness.)

DDS4 drive connected to the same SCSI chain that runs the drives.   /dev/st0
exists but when attempting to do even simple tar operations (eg. tar -t
/dev/st0) I get told that the device does not exist.   Pointless just doing tar
-t because the tar has been compiled to expect /dev/tape as default.   Not yet
tried looking in the /proc/scsi area to see what it thinks it has.

Any gentle hints, or beatings over the head with a 2 x 4 would be welcome :-)  
I have not spent much time on it, but suspect that the hardware is okay.   The
mt programme also fails on things as simple as "eject" or "rewind".   Tried
several tapes in it (including previously known good ones with data) but no
joy.

TIA,
Denis