On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 02:59:35PM +0200, Sylvia Gelman wrote:
> sendsize[26589]: time 3365.417: Total bytes written: -1830019072
> [...]
> sendsize[26589]: no size line match in /opt/gnu/bin/tar output for "/.test"

Note the negative value for "total bytes written".  It looks like
an integer overflow in that client's GNU tar.

I'm not sure whether your gtar is old, or merely needs to be
recompiled with support for 64-bit file systems.

(For use with Amanda, you should be running at least gtar
1.13.19, and preferably 1.13.25 or 1.14.  (I haven't seen any
complaints about 1.14, but but I haven't tried it myself.
1.13.25 was the usually recommended version for a long time.)
1.13 is known to be incompatible with Amanda in other ways,
though I don't know whether it has this particular problem.)

> What means no size line match ...

The way Amanda estimates the size of a backup is to actually do
the backup (using dump, GNU tar or whatever), but to redirect the
standard output (i.e. the backup itself) to /dev/null.  It then
reads the backup program's standard error, looking for something
that says how big the backup was.  For GNU tar, it looks for
a line matching this regexp:
        Total bytes written: [0-9][0-9]*
The "-" sign causes the line not to match the regexp -- which is
good, since the negative size would thoroughly confuse Amanda :-)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics AT telepres DOT com
|  |  /
It must be said that they would have sounded better if the singer
wouldn't throw his fellow band members to the ground and toss the
drum kit around during songs.
        - Patrick Lenneau