>* amrecover does not rewind the tape for you.  I'm sure that there
>  is a good reason for this, but I don't know what it is.  You have
>  to rewind the tape first, then run the command.

The normal mode for amrecover (actually, amrestore, which it calls)
is to do a linear scan of the tape searching for the image you want.
But some tape drives (e.g. DLT) can do an "mt fsf" **much** faster than
a linear scan.  So amrecover deliberately does not rewind at the start
in case you have already pre-positioned the tape.

It would be even better if amrecover did the rewind *and* the fsf,
but nobody has gotten around to implementing that.

>* On SCO Openserver 5, the 'mt' command does not handle the rewinding 
>  of the tape.  You have to use 'tape rewind <tapedevice>'

Famous saying: The wonderful thing about standards is there are so
many to pick from.  :-)

If you think you've got it bad, you should see all the work Amanda has
to do internally to support the bajillion platforms it runs on :-).

>* The hostname that amanda detects on SCO Openserver does not match the
>  hostname that is reported by 'hostname' or 'uname -a'.

Can you post an example?  This might be simple calling the wrong routine
on SCO to get the host name (more OS differences as mentioned above).

>* Oddly, when you've navigated to what you want to restore, add it,
>  and extract it, it does the extract from the disk level, not the
>  directory you were in when you added it.  Not a big problem, but
>  it caused a wee bit of confusion.

Huh?  Again, can you show an example.

In general, if you told Amanda to back up disk "/usr" and one of the files
backed up was "/usr/a/b/xxx", then if you start amrecover in directory
"/tmp/restore", the file brought back will be "/tmp/restore/a/b/xxx".
In other words, things backed up only know themselves relative to the
top level being processed (i.e. "a/b/xxx"), and they should come back
relative to whatever directory you do the restore into.

>* When GNU tar is installed off the skunkware CD, it appears as
>  /usr/local/bin/tar.  Amanda apparently looks for gtar.

Not sure what you mean here.  If you ran ./configure yourself, it should
have hunted around and found this version of tar (as Jean-Louis said).
If, however, you're running a pre-built version of Amanda, all bets are
off about how the person who put it together set things up.

>-Josh

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