Following the upgrade of a server from debian sarge to etch over the weekend, the backup software (amanda) decided that it didn't want to properly access the drive.
This was particularly odd as I've done several other upgrades from sarge to etch without a problem (or at least without problems to do with amanda) already. It turns out that the issue is with the particular tape drive in question (a USB connected HP DDS4 drive) being fussy about the tape block size. Downloading the amanda source and re-compiling with the tape block size (in the debian/rules file) set to 64 - the debian default was 256.
