On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 at 8:56am, Ivan Petrovich wrote

> Here's the problem:
> I mounted a remote file system on a GNU/Linux system using autofs, and
> amdump fails to back up some files on this file system due to
> "Permission denied." I verified that the files which give this error
> are those that have the 'read' permission bit turned off for 'others'.

*snip*

> So my questions are:
> 1. How exactly does Amanda's client get read access to all files that
> it dumps when it uses 'gtar'?

When using tar, amanda executes it via the setuid root 'runtar' script.  
So, tar is run as root.

> 2. Does any one know why it couldn't read all files on an auto-mounted
> file system?

At a guess, the default NFS export option (at least on Linux) is to map 
root (from clients) to nobody (on the server).  I'd guess that that is 
what's going on.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University