On Debian 3.1, 2.6.8 AMD86 SMP kernel...

I couldn't get amanda to backup some very large pieces of data (DLEs in
amandaspeak). They were 5 or 6 GB collections of sound files.

Turns out the problem was the iptables packet filter on the amanda
client. iptables has a timeout for idle TCP connections that was
breaking the connection to the server before the initial estimate of the
backup size was done (because it took so long to go through the huge
DLE).

The solution is to decrease the time between keepalive packets:

'echo 90 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_keepalive_time'

as described at:

http://documents.made-it.com/iptables-timeout.html

-- 
Glenn English
ghe AT slsware DOT com
GPG ID: D0D7FF20