Paul Bijnens wrote:
<snip>

This seems to me like you have several dumps of several dates on one
tape.  Also note there is no level 0 on this tape!!!

That tape came from an amflush and I missed doing it the previous
week.

So...
R4P17# mt -t /dev/nsa0 rewind
R4P17# amrestore -p /dev/nsa0 R4P17.gmihome.com.amrd0s1f.20051105.1

NO! You could at least do a "man amrestore" :-)
The above lines from amrestore are in the format:
        ...skipping host.company.com._the_disk_name.DATE.LVL

I've been rtfm'in the whole day.  I'm just thick headed.

amrestore expect the hostname and diskname (and "diskname" is actually
a pattern, not a string).  In your case that is:

   amrestore -p /dev/nsa0 R4P17.gmihome.com '^amrd0s1f$' 20051105

And, note the trailing '.1' on the line that was output by amrestore

meaning that the dumpimage is from a level 1 backup. That could be correct (when you changed amanda.conf since the last level 0), or

not correct (if you didn't change amanda.conf then you need the last
level 0 dump).

I actually wasn't aware that amanda would switch to a level 1 by
itself.

I find it also strange that you seem to have a level 1 of 20051105
and level 2 of the next day, and then again a level 1 of 20051112.
Where is the level 0 from between those dates???
And if you really want to restore from a level 1, are you sure
you don't need the latest one, from 20051112 ???

See above.  I had the wrong tape because I didn't know amanda
switched to level 1.

You also noted that you use dump/restore instead of gnutar. In
that case pipe to:

  amrestore .... | restore -ivbf 2 -

But because I expect that you will need to try this many times,
you could first restore the backup image to disk, by leaving out
the '-p' option of amrestore:

  amrestore /dev/nsa0 R4P17.gmihome.com '^amrd0s1f$' 20051105

Now you have a file on disk named:
  R4P17.gmihome.com.amrd0s1f.20051105.1

And then use the interactive mode of restore on this file:

  restore -ivbf 2 R4P17.gmihome.com.amrd0s1f.20051105.1

But, read "man restore" carefully, because "restore" is different
for each architecture and could have different options needed in your
environment.

I finally got it out in interactive mode.  To be honest, I think
everything you have said here should be in the docs.  As far as
I can tell, there is no method explained on how to extract a
single file if you cannot use amrecover as in the case of a
missing amanda.conf.

Thank you very much!