> /dev/sda9 is NOT a mount point, its a descriptor only and will
> probably fail forever.
>
> now, if that disk is mounted someplace, as in /mnt/sda9 on the machine
> whose alias is node1, and it is mounted when amdump runs, it should
> work like a champ.

Ok, what I'm experiencing lends that a lot of credence, but what sent me off 
in this direction was (from the amanda distribution, example disklist 
entries)

# Dump Joe's NetBSD machine, with the mounted MS-DOS partition dumped
# using tar.
#joespc  wd0a comp-root
#joespc  wd0e comp-user
#joespc /msdos comp-user-tar

which seems to imply that it's possible to back up unmounted partitions, and 
that would be really great! I've always been under the impression that this 
was amanda-possible somehow, but never have been able to make it happen.

Seems like this would be the way to back up a partition regardless of 
formatting (like an HFS+ or NT part, which is really what I'm after).