Hi, my name is Philip, and AMANDA is really new to me and perhaps a little
too complex for me to set-up properly.
Is there anyone who could possibly point out, or perhaps give me some tips
on how to get around a few problems that I am encountering.  Here is where I
am currently.
1. I have Perl 5 installed along with mkisofs and cdrecord on RedHat 8.0
2. I have a IDE CD-RW device. I was able to use SCSI emulation to get
cdrecord to work properly, and
    a cdrecord -scanbus tested just fine.
3. On the Linux system I have the Amanda base system files installed with
the rpm Amanda 2.4.2p2-9
4. I also have installed the Amanda-client 2.4.2p2-9 along with the
Amanda-sever 2.4.2p2-9.
5. I have all the dependencies for the Base system, server and client
installed
6. I downloaded CDRW-Taper from www.tivano.de/software/amanda/index.shtml
7. I renamed the Taper binary that came with Amanda to taper.original, that
file was located in
    /usr/lib/amanda
8. I moved the tivano "taper" binary and the "taperlib.pm" perl script to
/usr/lib/amanda/
9. I left the "amlabel-cdrw" in my root directory, which is /root/src
10. It's at this point everything seems to be falling apart for me, I am
just not sure how to deal with these
     configuration files. For example I don't even know what taper means, I
sort of feel like I am on life
     support.
11. I used the mkdir -p /usr/adm/amanda/normal.............but I have
nothing in there
12. I believe rpm created a  /etc/amanda directory which holds
"crontab.sample", "Daily-Set"1, and "normal."
13. In Daily-Set1 there was a Amanda.conf, I moved it to the /etc directory
not knowing if I should or not.
14. I then went to my /etc/services files and this is what I saw
        kamanda         10081/tcp                       # amanda backup services
(Kerberos)
        kamanda         10081/udp                       # amanda backup services
(Kerberos)
        amandaidx
15. I then enabled amanda.idx, amidxtape, and amanda them in /etc/xinetd.d
by issuing disable =no
16. Then I restarted my xinetd server by the issuing the "restart" parameter
to xinetd from /etc/init.d/
17  I am not sure how to make a "disk list" nor exactly where to put it.
18. I do not really know what I need to edit in "Amanda.conf". nor how to
execute the back-ups properly.
19. Nor do I really have a handle on how taperlib.pm and amlabel-cdrw come
into play

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am  trying to fill in the Gaps, but
at the same time I am
a little overwhelmed.......with it all but I think Amanda will pay off
though, if I can ever master it.
Thanks for your time


Philip