Gene Heskett <gene.heskett AT verizon DOT net> wrote in message
<200602281004.52325.gene.heskett AT verizon DOT net>

> On Tuesday 28 February 2006 09:25, Tony van der Hoff wrote:
> > Gene Heskett <gene.heskett AT verizon DOT net> wrote in message
> > <200602271737.46076.gene.heskett AT verizon DOT net>
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > > And at this point, I am lost.  I'm not familiar with the syntax you
> > > are using for the excludes specification, particularly the "*" of that
> > > spec as you are using it.  No idea if thats something new or what.
> > > I've never used such here as I A: use "exclude filename" named in the
> > > dumptype, and B: have since I learned about it, used the "./name"
> > > formats in those files. [snip]
> >
> > Thanks, Jon and Gene :)
> >
> > I'll make those changes to the config files as you suggest, I might as
> > well get it right. I feel like it's grasping at staws, though; this
> > config has been working for 3 years :(
> 
> But, has it been doing exactly as you expected?  A recovery to /tmp might
> be in interesting, just to see what comes back.  I have a hunch its been
> getting more than you intended.

OK, I've been doing some more research. I didn't think I'd just dreamt up
that * syntax :)

As I understand it, Amanda passes the exclude file name on to GNU-tar (man
amanda):
exclude [ list|file ][[optional][ append ][  string ]+]
        Default: file. There are two exclude lists, exclude file and ex-
        clude  list. With exclude file , the string is a GNU-tar exclude
        expression. With exclude list , the string is a file name on the
        client containing GNU-tar exclude expressions.
        All  exclude expressions are concatenated in one file and passed
        to GNU-tar as an --exclude-from argument.

Now GNU-tar accepts wildcards in the exclude list, unless the switch
--no-wildcards is specified. Amanda's not doing that. 
>From man tar:
-X, --exclude-from=FILE
        exclude patterns listed in FILE
note _patterns_

I would conclude that what I am doing is quite legitimate, and should
achieve my desired action, that is to exclude all 'tmp' directories, i.e. in
the /usr disk list, not just /usr/tmp (which would be specified by the
suggested ./tmp syntax), but also /usr/local/tmp, and others further town
the hierarchy.

On the other hand, it does look like you are quite correct in pointing out
that the exclude /var/spool syntax is wrong. There is no way that would
match anything, and the point about my backing up /var/www twice is well
made :)

So, I've fixed those disk lists, and did another amdump, followed by an
amverify. Same result: amverify hangs/crashes seemingly at the end of tape,
without any meaningful report. So I think the disk list problems are a bit
of a red herring.

I then did some dd restores for all the DLEs on the tape, and it turns out
that the very first image is corrupt, causing GNU tar (1.15.1) to abort with
an error. However, amverify doesn't spot this, and happily extracts
everything from the tape, piping it into thin air, until it reaches EoT,
after which it simply hange.

I've been trying, with little success so far, to figure out why this
particular image is corrupt; it is absolutely repeatable on successive
amdump runs, but the disk directory seems OK. Can anyone point me at the
code that creates the image, please.



-- 
Tony van der Hoff        | mailto:tony AT vanderhoff DOT org
Buckinghamshire, England