Well, good news and bad news... The good news is that, after an apt-get upgrade on the tapehost[1] last week, the dumps from my samba DLEs seem to be reliable and complete.
The bad news is that amanda still reports them as "strange", with the strange dump summary consisting of several variations on ? SUCCESS - 0 listing \download\hp\laserjet\* ? SUCCESS - 0 opening remote file \download\hp\README.TXT (\download\hp\) Where do I go to tell amanda that these "SUCCESS..." messages should be considered normal? [1] Midway through, I discovered that I hadn't simply forgotten about the tapehost, but there was a good reason I had left it on potato: Its poor little 2G system drive wasn't big enough to handle an apt-get dist-upgrade. I (re)learned this the hard way when the 450M /usr partition filled while extracting packages... But it turned out the previous admin had installed all kinds of X and CD ripping crap on it (even though being a tapehost is its only purpose in life), so an hour or two of quality time with dpkg --get-selections and apt-get remove --purge freed up plenty of space. :p