On Tuesday 05 July 2005 12:47, Graeme Humphries wrote:
>On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 11:41 -0500, Frank Smith wrote:
>> amcheck runs as your Amanda user and may not have permissions to
>> the directory where your exclude file lives.
>
>I *thought* I had amanda running as root on the client, but I may be
>wrong. It doesn't complain that it can't access any of those shares,
>which only root should be able to have full access to.

This is beginning to sound as if the install isn't quite right.

1) amanda MUST be built by the user who will run it, in most cases 
this would be the user 'amanda'.

2) The user amanda MUST be a member of a high ranking group such as 
'disk', 'backup', or I've seen one case of 'sys'.

3) amanda MUST be installed by root after being built.

4) the user running amanda must be the one who built it.

5) only when all the above is followed, will all the exec permissions 
be correct.  Amanda will do its own suid to root when it needs those 
perms.  This fails if root built it.

If you installed from an rpm, I've seen a couple of broken rpms, and 
generally speaking, probably well over 80% of us have built it from 
tarballs.  I build every new snapshot of 2.4.5 thats put up within a 
day or so of its appearance, and run that one till the next one shows 
up or I get bit & have to back up a version.  Thats been a very 
un-common occurance...

And finally, to amanda (and tar) there is a huge difference between an 
".amanda-excludes" file and an "./.amanda-excludes" file.  It takes 
the leading ./ to anchor it to the current directory.  The second . 
in front of the amanda-excludes file only serves to hide it from a 
normal directory listing.  Now, you can have such a file as 
an .amanda-excludes, which contains a list of stuff in ./ style to 
skip, but in my experience with using it, a full path to the excludes 
file was needed, such as "/amanda/.amanda-excludes".

>>   'optional' just means it's ok to not be there, but 'permission
>> denied' is an error and Amanda reports it as such.
>
>That's not what the online man page seems to say:
>
>"If optional is specified for exclude list, then amcheck will not
>complain if the file doesn't exist or is not readable."
>
>The file is not readable (permission denied entering the directory
> that contains is). Maybe it only checks for permission problems on
> the exact file, and not on containing directories?
>
>Graeme

And this says the install isn't quite up to specs, see above.  Its 
also in the top 10 FAQ I believe.

I HTH, Graeme.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.