In the amanda-2.4.4.tar.gz source tarball, I noticed that client-src/sendbackup-gnutar.c has a hardcoded call to "gtar" (as opposed to plain "tar"). This caused backup failures on my FreeBSD server until I symlinked /usr/bin/tar -> /usr/bin/gtar. I can't figure why that should be the case. Any thoughts?
You have the source tarball, and the after unpacking it and reading the docs/INSTALL, you usually do:
./configure --prefix=... --with-gnutar=... ...
If you leave out the --with-gnutar option, configure will look itself for the gnutar command.
The reason it is built in, is because the client programs do not need a configuration file.
A frequent trick is to compile with --with-gnutar=/usr/local/bin/amgtar. And the "amgtar" command can be as simple as a symlink to the good version of gnutar, or a shell script that creates a snapshot before running gnutar, or shuts down databases etc.
-- Paul
