Gene Heskett wrote:

Generally speaking, when amanda sets something up to do, it uses a set of defaults derived from previous stanza's. My not too well educated guess is that if none have been established, the really empty options list is the problem.

I'm not convinced that the use of two '/services' strings in the disklist is 100% kosher either. From perusing mine, the first string is the alias or the FQDN of the machine to be backed up.

That was one idea I had but even with a symbolic name, "Services" it had
problems. The tradeoff for me is matching up names on the printed reports
with files on the systems. I tend not to use a symbolic name (the second field
in my case) if I don't have to. I simplified to the DLE to look like

        cluster1-node1.wmi.com /services global 1 local

and had the same problem. Since this relies on only 1 dumptype entry there
shouldn't be an ordering problem. The dumptypes come after all the other
options.

Where the use of {} is brought into play, see this stanza in your disklist if you just added to the default disklist:

What do you mean by the default disklist?

So by using '/services' twice, technically I believe its correct, but I'd be wary of unwanted interactions just to be my usual somewhat paranoid self. But I think the real error is in the order of the dumptype defines in your amanda.conf.

I moved the dumptype define for this DLE to the bottom of amanda.conf and
the problem was still there. When I added "strategy skip" to the dumptype
define the problem went away. I don't claim this proves my config files
are correct but I feel that's the hint I am getting. Also, if there were
an issue with the order of entries in amanda.conf then moving the DLE in
the diskfile shouldn't make a difference.

I do have more data points. The backup ran ok last night with that DLE
at the bottom of the disklist file. I also added a duplicate DLE using a
cname for the host. Both completed without problems. There are also
other entries that were disabled with "strategy skip". If I remove this
line from the dumptype I see the same problem.

I didn't expect these issues when we moved to our new servers. Then again,
I should know better. I've been down this road before and there is always
a surprise waiting for you.

- Joel