With a lot of help from this list, especially Casile and Siavosh, I
finally got Amanda working on Red Hat 7, just as it was installed with
the rpm's!
After much futzing around with the .amandahosts file, it turned out Red
Hat's default one had been right all along. The last little gotcha I
ran into was the "operator" user that had been created had not been made
a member of the "disk" group, although most file ownerships were
correct. . Once I took care of that little detail, everything is golden.
Thanks for your help.