If you are saying that all of the paths you tell Amanda to back up are soft links,
you have a big problem. All that will be backed up are the links themselves, not
the directories they point to. Also, disklist entries are usually directories or
partitions and not files, but if you are using GNU tar I suppose passing it a filename
instead of a directory would work (anyone here know for sure?).
No, they can't be a plain file.
Amanda invokes GNU tar with the option "--directory /some/dir" and the "/some/dir" is the entry you specified in the disklist file. As the man page says, GNU tar first does a "chdir" to that directory. This has as consequences that: 1. It cannot be a plain file. 2. If it is a symlink to a directory, that symlink is dereferenced. (symlinks INSIDE the directory are not dereferenced because GNUtar is invoked without the "--dereference" options. That's good!)
If you have a disk-partition instead of the mount point in your disklist file, like "/dev/hda7" then Amanda consults the mount table to find out
where it is mounted and passes e.g. "/home" instead.
In the case of DUMP it is just reversed: Amanda replaces a directory mount point with the character device of the disk partition.
(see "client-src/getfsent.c" for the definitive answer :-)
-- Paul Bijnens, Xplanation Tel +32 16 397.511 Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM Fax +32 16 397.512 http://www.xplanation.com/ email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *********************************************************************** * I think I've got the hang of it now: exit, ^D, ^C, ^\, ^Z, ^Q, F6, * * quit, ZZ, :q, :q!, M-Z, ^X^C, logoff, logout, close, bye, /bye, * * stop, end, F3, ~., ^]c, +++ ATH, disconnect, halt, abort, hangup, * * PF4, F20, ^X^X, :D::D, KJOB, F14-f-e, F8-e, kill -1 $$, shutdown, * * kill -9 1, Alt-F4, Ctrl-Alt-Del, AltGr-NumLock, Stop-A, ... * * ... "Are you sure?" ... YES ... Phew ... I'm out * ***********************************************************************
