--On Wednesday, November 13, 2002 09:49:56 -0700 "Carl D. Blake" <carl AT 
boeckeler DOT com> wrote:

On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 18:02, Gene Heskett wrote:

Greets folks;

I now have recovered as much as I can, but a couple of things need
to be said.

Not enough emphasis is placed on the fact that tar won't access a
file with any kind of a lock on it, and in the case of amanda, its
certainly a fixable problem.  I recovered all the indexes and
curfiles and such but absolutely nothing else that could be
construed as a configuration file.

So chg-scsi.conf, amanda.conf, disklist, tapelist & the rest of the
configuration stuff in /usr/local/etc/amanda/DailySet1 is gone and
I'm going to have to re-invent a goodly number of wheels before
amanda is back up and running.

I'm a little puzzled.  When I look at the files that amanda says it
backed up it looks like it backed up the above files you mentioned on my
system.  My system is a RedHat Linux 6.0 system using GNU tar V1.12.  Is
your system and/or tar different?

I don't think it is a universal problem, although I'm sure it can be painful
for those that discover it.  My system (Debian 3.0, tar 1.13.19) backs them up
fine.  I even get occasional 'file changed as we read it' messages backing
up changing index files, so tar isn't even skipping files with active write
locks on my system.
 If there are certain versions, filesystems, etc. that can cause this
problem then something needs to be added to the docs so the people impacted
can work around it.

Frank

--
Frank Smith                                                fsmith AT hoovers 
DOT com
Systems Administrator                                     Voice: 512-374-4673
Hoover's Online                                             Fax: 512-374-4501