It's been over a month, and I'm still having problems with my AIT-2 tape drive 
(seems like I'm having a lot of amanda problems in general as of late).

As a recap...  I could successfully run amdump & have amanda write dumps to 
tape.  But when I tried to restore data from Amanda via "am recover", I would 
get the following errors:

tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: A lone zero block at 1639303
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
extract_list - child returned non-zero status: 2


I've made more progress & am able to center in on the problem, I just don't 
know how to resolve it.  My problem occurs when I use compression on a backup, 
and have the backup written to tape.  For example:


Backup using Compression Fast with GNUTAR
=========================================
*) Amrecover restoring data from an image in the holding disk - successful
*) Amrecover restoring data from an image written to an AIT-2 tape - fails


Backup using no Compression with GNUTAR
=======================================
*) Amrecover restoring data from an image in the holding disk - successful
*) Amrecover restoring data from an image written to an AIT-2 tape - successful


My current Config:
Amanda - 2.4.4.p1       Tar - 1.13.94   Gzip - 1.3.5

Any suggestions are appreciated.

-Rob