Greets folks;

I now have recovered as much as I can, but a couple of things need 
to be said.

Not enough emphasis is placed on the fact that tar won't access a 
file with any kind of a lock on it, and in the case of amanda, its 
certainly a fixable problem.  I recovered all the indexes and 
curfiles and such but absolutely nothing else that could be 
construed as a configuration file.  

So chg-scsi.conf, amanda.conf, disklist, tapelist & the rest of the 
configuration stuff in /usr/local/etc/amanda/DailySet1 is gone and 
I'm going to have to re-invent a goodly number of wheels before 
amanda is back up and running.

How to fix?  By having amanda make a forced overwrite backup copy of 
any file it needs to open for reference and then open and lock for 
its own use, that backup copy of the real config files.  In this 
manner, all the real configs would be unlocked and saveable, 
potentially simplifying the heck out of a recovery operation to the 
point of once again having a working amanda when you're done.  Disk 
space occupied by those "backup" copies shouldn't be much of a 
problem in this day and age of $110 60 gig drives.

Similarly, the tapelist and such files that get updated shouldn't 
really be subjected to a lock until such time as the file is 
actually being updated.  Sure, verify it's there at the amdump 
startup, but then close it up till its time to modify it.  I see no 
reason to maintain a full time lock on such record keeping files as 
the tapelist.

Comments everybody?

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
99.19% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly

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