The Unix admin quit a few weeks ago and I have been trying to pickup the pieces, with little Unix experience. So, if possible, could someone please help me out here with Amanda? I have tried to figure it out on my own to no avail, and the literature hasn't helped me much, since I am such a novice.

-(FIRST PROBLEM)

When the admin left, she said she "suspended" amanda. By "suspended" it appears that she meant she commented out amanda's crontab. So, the first thing I did was to remove the #'s and see if it would run properly. It didn't; the crontab didn't run at all. Another admin that I know, but who isn't familiar with Amanda, tried to help me through setting up the crontab. I did the following:

1) As root, "crontab -e amanda". I created the crontab all over again, which looks like the following (2 lines):

0 16 * * 1-5 /opt/bin/amcheck -m geo
45 0 * * 2-6 /opt/bin/amdump geo;mt -f /dev/rmt/0 off  

2) "crontab amanda"
3) "chown amanda amanda"
4) "chmod 600 amanda"

This time the crontab ran, but something didn't work right. I got an email from Amanda saying the following:

"Amanda Tape Server Host Check
-----------------------------
/dump: 5549882 KB disk space available, that's plenty.
ERROR: /dev/rmt/0hn: no tape online.
       (expecting tape geo_vol51 or a new tape)
NOTE: skipping tape-writeable test.
Server check took 0.030 seconds.
Amanda Backup Client Hosts Check
--------------------------------
Client check: 5 hosts checked in 0.140 seconds, 0 problems found.
(brought to you by Amanda 2.3.0.4)"

The tape was in the drive and when I manually entered "/opt/bin/amcheck -m geo", it found the tape fine (as "su amanda").

After a few days screwing around with this, I still have not gotten it to work properly from cron (still cannot find the tape). But I can manually do it from the command line. Since I was getting worried that the backups weren't getting done, I decided to manually run "amdump" from the command line (as "su amanda"). So I entered "/opt/bin/amdump geo;mt -f /dev/rmt/0 off" and the backup ran.

-(SECOND PROBLEM)

However, even though the backup ran, I got a warning:

"driver: WARNING: /dump: 5120000 KB requested, but only 3549720 KB available.
planner: Incremental of nutmeg:/pc bumped to level 2."

There were many more "planner" entries. (This text was snipped from the report of the amdump that Amanda emailed me).

You will notice in the "amcheck" that I quoted at the top that "amcheck" reported "/dump: 5549882 KB disk space available, that's plenty." This was the first day that I tried getting Amanda to work. There were about 4-5 days between then and when I manually ran Amanda from the command line. So, not only do I have a problem with the crontab, it also appears that I now have a problem with the dump being too big for the tape.

-(QUESTIONS)

1) Can anyone, please, help me with *exactly*, *literally* what I need to do to get the crontab setup properly? Apparantly I did something wrong.

2) Is there anyway to rebuild the dump directory so that I don't get the not enough space on the tape error? I think I might have messed something up there and either duplicated data or doubled up the dump such that the dump dir has the data for two tapes stored for backup. I know for a fact that there *should* be enough space on the tapes because I have read the logs for previous backups performed under the previous admin.

Thank you in advance,

Robert Renzetti
Computer Systems Manager
Geology & Geophysics
Texas A&M University
(979) 845-1366

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