On Tue, Jul 29, 2003 at 01:32:19AM +0800, Matthias Bethke wrote:
> Hi Gene,
> on Monday, 2003-07-28 at 07:25:08, you wrote:
> > >| EGREP=grep -E
> > >
> > >certainly looked wrong to me. Quoting did it:
> > >| EGREP='grep -E'
> > 
> > I don't use this but that is how it is in my copy of 
> > amanda-2.4.4p1-20030716, at line 33, with the quotes.
> 
> Must have been fixed meanwhile -- my install directory is from June
> 26th, I guess I downloaded the source one or two days before.
> 
> > > length 3848 mbytes
> > > [...]
> > 
> > This looks as if the drives compression is on.  If it is, then the 
> > data from /dev/urandom gets somewhat expanded by it, and will report 
> > a bit less than the tapes raw capacity.
> 
> Hmm...I was a bit surprised about this value already, but according to
> both the DIP switch and mt, compression is off.
> 
> > Since the gzip that amanda uses can beat the hardware in every dept
> > but speed, we generally recommend that the drives hardware compressor
> > be disabled.
> 
> Can amanda be told to use bzip2? This P3 is far from fully loaded with
> its job as a WLAN router and fileserver, and as it cannot be clocked
> down to save some energy, it might as well do something useful for the
> calories it burns :)

I've been looking at patching amanda to do bzip2 (actually, any
arbitrary external compression program), but I'm not done
yet. :-( A patch to just replace gzip with bzip2 is easy, but loses
the ability to read old dumps.

I don't know if anyone else has done any work in that direction.
Maybe these posts to the list will jog someone's memory.

                        -- JF