>I guess my question was triggered by error messages like:
>...
>    ERROR: kanga.honeypot.net: [could not access /usr/share/media/music/all (/
>usr/share/media/music/all): Permission denied]

The selfcheck side of amcheck does an access() system call and it's
running as the Amanda user at that point.  For GNU tar, all it's checking
is to see if the thing exists.  Since you're getting an error, that
implies one of the parent directories is locking out access.

All amcheck is trying to do here is take "fribble" that you put in the
disklist and make sure it exists on the client so you'll get an early
warning if there is, for instance, a typo.  Since the permissions won't
allow that to be done except as root, you can just ignore the error and
if there's really a problem, it will be caught by GNU tar during the
actual amdump run.

If it would not break your security setup, you could open up group
execute access to the parent directory tree elements and put them in a
group the Amanda user is a member of (or put Amanda in their group) just
to get rid of the error message.  Other than that, and short of running
something else setuid-root (which Amanda avoids as much as possible), I
don't think there's any good way to detect existance for amcheck's purpose.

>Kirk Strauser

John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, jrj AT purdue DOT edu