Here is an FYI wrap-up of a problem I sent to users and hackers lists a
week or so ago. Problem was that amcheck worked most of the time, but
timed out occasionally to frequently, especially for a Linux host.
Solution was to recheck what I (thought I) had done in setting up the
/etc/services and /etc/inetd.conf files. When setting up the clients, I
had mis-specified nowait in the following inetd.conf line:

amanda dgram udp nowait amanda /usr/local/amanda/libexec/amandad amandad

The specification (per the installation instructions) should have been
"wait" instead of "nowait". It was easy to overlook the error because the
other amanda-related lines in the file appropriately used nowait. Of
course, with the wonders of cut and paste, I propagated the error to all
of the clients. When I fixed it, time outs disappeared for all of my
clients *except* for the Linux box. Weird behavior persisting there was
that amcheck routinely called into being nearly twenty instances of
amandad and still timed out frequently. So... I just upgraded the Linux
host from RedHat 6.2 to 7.3 and the problem went away. A side benefit is
that the upgrade automatically took care of migrating everything from the
inetd.conf style to the xinetd style of configuring services. I've now run
through two consecutive days, backing up 21 partitions on 7 hosts, without
a hiccup.

One new question (there's always one more) concerns the port 10080 entries
that RedHat 7.3 set up for amanda in the new /etc/services file:

amanda          10080/tcp                       # amanda backup services
amanda          10080/udp                       # amanda backup services

I don't recall anything from the various versions of installation
instructions about setting up amanda for tcp on 10080. Can anyone comment
on the reason/effect of this entry?

Robert L. Becker, Jr.
Col, USAF, MC
Department of Cellular Pathology
Armed Forces Institute of Pathology
Washington, DC 20306-6000
301-319-0300


On Thu, 6 Jun 2002, Robert L. Becker Jr. wrote:

> Folks -- I'm posting a request for help to hackers list because 1) I've
> seen no definitive help so far from other users, and 2) investigation is
> leading into packet dissection that is way over my head.
>
> Problem seems to be udp miscommunication during amcheck and (apparently)
> during amdump. Client/Server links through amandad work for various hosts
> one time, but not the next. Previous posts to amanda-users (see thread
> "Intermittent time-outs") describe sporadic amcheck failures, with timeout
> errors reported at the level of dgram_recv, for example (to a host for
> which selfcheck succeeded minutes before):
>
> amandad: weird, it's not a proper ack
>   addr: peer 10.20.30.55 dup 10.20.30.55, port: peer 559 dup 582
> amandad: dgram_recv: recvfrom() failed: Connection refused
> amandad: waiting for ack: Connection refused, retrying
> amandad: dgram_recv: recvfrom() failed: Connection refused
> amandad: waiting for ack: Connection refused, retrying
> amandad: dgram_recv: recvfrom() failed: Connection refused
> amandad: waiting for ack: Connection refused, retrying
> amandad: dgram_recv: recvfrom() failed: Connection refused
> amandad: waiting for ack: Connection refused, giving up!
> amandad: pid 1143 finish time Wed Jun  5 10:42:27 2002
>

[snipping out the rest of prior post to hackers list, now overtaken by
events... anyone interested in symptoms can find the full msg in the
hacker archives]

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