I have an older HP NetServer LPr with what is apparently a Symbios SCSI card connecting to a Quantum SuperLoader 3 that is DLT based. From time to time, we seem to lose the connection to the autoloader. It's usually due to flaky power, but not totally sure why; sometimes when this happens the Autoloader's LED's are orange and it needs to be power cycled. The annoying workaround currently is to reboot the machine. As it is our production VPN and DNS server in addition to being our backup server, this is less than optimal.

In Debian (Sarge) is there not some command one can type to get the card to notice that it has the autoloader connected again?

dcr1:/proc# grep -i symbios /proc/pci
    SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c895 (rev 1).
dcr1:/proc# uname -a
Linux dcr1 2.4.27-3-686 #1 Tue Dec 5 21:03:54 UTC 2006 i686 GNU/Linux
dcr1:/proc# mt status
mt: /dev/tape: No such device
dcr1:/proc# ls -l /dev/tape
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2007-02-07 16:01 /dev/tape -> /dev/st0
dcr1:/proc#

That mt status command will show the actual st0 status when things are working correctly. The No such device message is usually the second clue that we need to reboot - the first clue is usually that the backups didn't run.