>   Yeah, I was tired of the RPM nonsense. I wrote a script that rebuilds all 
> updates every weekend and emails the results. It's worked very nicely thus 
> far.

Eww! You scare me. ;] *grin*

I'm a rigid believer in "if it ain't broke, don't update it".

> 
> > At this point, I'm very uncertain what could have changed to make
> > xinetd fuss. Let us know what fixes it.
> 
>   Okay, I seem to have pin-pointed it. I fixed the lines "only_from=hostname" 
> in the xinetd config file for Amanda. What I think probably happened is that 
> my server resolves to more than one name (recent change in departments here 
> at the University), and xinetd was getting the one I hadn't specified. So, I 
> changed the line to the IP address of the host, instead of its hostname, and 
> it's much happier now.

Ah! Thats a FEATURE! ;]

The AMANDA_TAPESERVER shell variable can be set before calling "emerge
amanda" to configure it to allow a remote tapeserver to backup the
client while simultaneously preventing other machines from contacting
amandad due to past exploits. This allow you to rollout amanda across
multiple gentoo boxes with a central tapeserver in an automated
manner.

I suggest you already have xinetd installed, and then just restart
xinetd after amanda is installed and you've got a fully configured
client. ;]

Russell