On Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 12:39:54PM +0900, David Leangen enlightened us:
------------< snip <------< snip <------< snip <------------
> >Are you recovering on the same machine you backed up from ?
> 
> No... and I suspect this would be the problem. Thank you for pointing 
> this out...
> 
> Using this hint, I noticed that user A has UID 502 on the remote 
> machine, but 502 on the backup server (where I am restoring the data) 
> refers to user B.
>

Yep, that's the problem.

> So, obviously, amanda is using UID numerically, which is why the owner 
> of the files on the backup machine becomes B(502) instead of A(?). This 
> may be obvious to most people, of course, but this is the first time 
> I've had to worry about this.
> 

Well, to be exact, tar is storing the UIDs. 

> So, what do you think would be the best way to manage this in order to 
> retain the correct permissions during a restore? Should I manually 
> change UIDs? (Seems VERY difficult to manage!) Or do I need to learn 
> about NIS, or something?
> 
> Any advice would be very helpful!
> 

That's really outside the scope of this mailing list, but yes, depending on
the size of your userbase, NIS/NIS+ or LDAP might be a good idea. If you're
only talking about a couple of machines and a couple of users, you can also
do things like rsync passwd and shadow files. 

Matt

-- 
Matt Hyclak
Department of Mathematics 
Department of Social Work
Ohio University
(740) 593-1263