> > 
> > >>For configuration, testing and restore purposes for 
> newbies like me.

It's OK to be a newbie, but the best way to get over it is to dive in, 
find something you don't understand, and figure it out. If that leads
you to something else you don't get, figure that out too. Take notes
in your own words, so you can find your way back out of the jungle.

> You're completely right, the GUI shouldn't make things to simple. An 
> administrator should understand how things work.
> 
> IMHO, a GUI would be nice for the not-so-skilles _users_. I regularly
> hear about the nice GUI of Tivoli (the system formerly known as 
> ADSM ;) ). To be honest, I never used that GUI and I know it's not
> nearly as capable in configuring your backup as writing your dsm.sys
> (that's one of the client configuration files) manually, but 
> people are
> capable to do their backup with it.
> 

I'm working on at least part of a web-based GUI for AMANDA between now
and the end of the year. I'd like to release it to the community after
it's done if I can clear that with the company. 

Our reason for an AMANDA GUI? We're deploying AMANDA at our client sites
as a backup solution for a document imaging system, and they're mostly
Windows or AS/400 shops. They're doing command-line backups now, and 
they're not doing them very often. They would do their backups much more
often if it was a matter of looking at a web page for the next tape to
use (amadmin DailySet1 tape), loading that tape, and hitting a button to
check configuration (amcheck DailySet1), then hitting another button to
run the backup (amdump DailySet1). They already know that a restore is
going to involve a support call, so I don't have to write a restore
interface. Yet. 

> 
> Perhaps I find the time to implement something like this in the next 
> weeks...but to be honest before having a GUI for amanda I 
> would prefer 
> seeing a windows client *duck* :)

No need to duck! Lots of people would like this, just search for 'SAMBA'
in the mailing list archives. I looked at this "back in the day", and it
breaks down to two parts: A tar clone that can backup and restore files
under NT, and amandad. There are instructions for building amandad under
Cygwin, and there was a SourceForge project for an AMANDA client that had
(IIRC) 90% of a working NT tar, with ACLs. If you combine the two with a 
little elbow grease, you could have a Windows client in an afternoon. If
you need to do it without a full Cygwin installation, you could probably
just copy the right files and registry entries out of an existing one. 
(I know you can run Cygwin's ssh.exe with just one other DLL, I think it's
cygwin1.dll.)