Turgut Kalfaoglu wrote:

Hi there. I backup a system, and I notice that it complains about 'unusual
or strange backup result' during the email. These are files I forgot to
exclude; things like logs, that change during the backup.
So, I added them to /etc/exclude.gtar which is defined properly in
amanda.conf in 'server-tar', the exclude.gtar is stored at the client, and
I am running the client as root (so that it has access to everything), and
amcheck shows no problems. yet, every day I keep getting complaints about
the same files; like   ./apache/cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/sessions/blah has
changed. well, in exclude.gtar I have:
./apache/cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/sessions
and I assumed that this should have stopped everything under 'sessions'
from being backed up?

I checked the wording, in fact, I did cut/paste from the error emails.
I'm obviously missing something! Can anyone help?

Obviously there is something wrong.  But besides telling us everything
is allright, you didn't prove it to us.
Show the exact errors, show the exact configs, instead of saying "they
are defined properly".  Also mentioning the program version(s) can help
sometimes.
In the worst case, you get a second opinion about the correctness,
and in the best case, we notice the error.

One strange thing already is that you run the client as root.  That's
not the way it should be done. In fact there is code in amandad.c (line
148-167) to avoid this.  The "runtar" and "rundump" programs in libexec
should be installed suid-root however, just to overcome the limitation
about access to all files.

But I guess this has nothing to do with the exclude problem.


A common error with excludes is the omission of the "list" keyword
when specifying a file with a list of excludes.

hour.host  /the/directory {
        comp-user-tar
        exclude list "/etc/exclude.gtar"
        }

--
Paul @ Home