>I'm not sure its possible to run concurrent Amanda's (at least not
>without compiling different versions using different ports, etc).

It depends a little on your environment.  If you can partition the clients
into separate groups (i.e. the same client is not in more than one Amanda
configuration), you can run multiple Amanda servers at the same time.
I used to do this quite a bit through our robot with several tape drives.

If you cannot easily divide up the clients, then, as Chris Karakas says,
there is a *high* probability multiple servers will go after the same
client at the same time and only one will "win".

We need to do this here for our end of semester checkpoint (full dump), so
I wrote a very small patch to add a "servicename" entry to amanda.conf.
It lets me tell a given configuration to use (e.g.) "amanda-alt1"
instead of "amanda" as the service to connect to on the client.  This is
essentially a runtime version of the AMANDA_SERVICE_NAME configuration
time variable.  Then I have multiple inetd entries listening on all the
potential services.  Works great.

I haven't put this change into the source tree because it's a hack and
I think the whole arrangement should be thought through again, but if
anyone wants it:

  http://www-rcd.cc.purdue.edu/~jrj/Backups/servicename.diff

Or (since this web server appears to be down at the moment):

  ftp://gandalf.cc.purdue.edu/pub/amanda/servicename.diff

I don't recall what version of Amanda this applies to, but it's a trivial
change that should be easy to tweak to fit.

>Frank

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