**OOPS...forgot to cc the list. Sorry.

>  From what I've understood, Amanda should be run from a cron job, for
> example at at midnight, once a day. I've also understood that you can 
> configure Amanda to only run on weekdays.

Absolutely...I do my backups this way. If you know anything about cron,
you know you can pick and choose your days, hours, minutes etc for when
you want the dump to run.
> 
> So, basically, the ideal scenario is to have someone go in to the
> server room every morning, remove the ejected tape from the previous 
> day, and store it in a safe. The operator should then put in the next 
> tape in the cycle. The operator could even take the tapes home as a 
> crude off-site backup.

This is how I do it. 
> 
> However, is it possible to tell Amanda to never ever use more
> than one 
> tape per day, circumventing the lack of a tape changer or tape 
> operator? Basically, it might be able to fully dump one 
> filesystem, and 
> only do incremental dumps on the rest of them, never performing more 
> than one full dump per tape.

Amanda can't use what isn't there. If there aren't anymore tapes...it
can't use them. The minute you tell amanda you're using a standalone
drive, it will configure your run for whatever tape size you've given it
in the configuration. If it can fit a full level 0 on there, it will,
otherwise it will plan to degrade the backup so it fits. Or in the event
that there is no tape it will leave it in the holding disk until you are
able to flush it to tape.