One other thing. Joshua asked what your amandad xinetd entry looked like. In particular, you need "groups yes" (or something like that) to make xinetd put amandad in all the alternate groups (why they didn't make this the default is beyond me). Without that, amandad will only be run in its primary group, which is not "disk" and thus has no access.
When you use "su", you get all the alternate groups, so that's why it works from there. I have a TODO list item to log the alternate groups in the debug file, which would help diagnose this problem, but it's harder than you might think (it used to be a non-standard system call, so portability is a problem). John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
