Amanda issues

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1

There seems to be an issue with Amanda as built for 11.1.

I upgraded from 10.1 and found that the tape device files - /dev/nst* - defaulted to root:root ownership and therefore could not be written by the amanda user. I could resolve this by adding into /etc/permissions.local the lines

/dev/nst0 root:disk 660
/dev/nst0a root:disk 660
/dev/nst0l root:disk 660
/dev/nst0m root:disk 660

That resolved that issue and amcheck runs fine with my existing amanda.conf

Unfortunately amlabel is still unable to label or read the tape label correctly - an HP DAT160 fwiw. I just get the following:

amanda@upbeat:/etc/amanda/mydump> amlabel mydump MYDUMP-03
rewinding, reading label, not an amanda tape (Device or resource busy)
rewinding, writing label MYDUMP-03, checking label
amlabel: not an amanda tape (Device or resource busy)

From what I can see on the amanda lists, this is potentially an issue with the block size at compile time. I’ve been too busy to follow this through and try a new compile but I’m pretty hacked off. These problems did not exist in 10.1

2

Now submitted in bugzilla

3

Tried on an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS aerver and the problem persisted.

However…I think I’ve been able to resolve the issue by adding the lines

    BlockSize 32kb 
    ReadBlockSize 32kb

to the tapetype definition after picking up a vital clue on the Gentoo bugzilla (Gentoo Bug 234062 - app-backup/amanda-2.5.2_p1-r4 “Device or resource busy”).

Definitely seems to be an issue in the move from amanda 2.5.1 to 2.5.2 (and later?) that is underdocumented and the solution is not apparent from the standard tapetype examples or the output from amtapetype.

Again, this has only been tested with an external USB HP DAT160 on ix86.