> I am using Amanda since a couple of years on an ADIC and a HP Surestore
> Robot and am quite happy with it, actually very happy ;-)

Yes. Amanda is really great! :)

> My last project was to put Amanda on two Dell Poweredge servers that
> feature a DDS4 Tape backup (just one slot, no robot). So far, so good. I

> The Problems that I have are minor but maybe somebody has seen it
> before: 
> 1. If there is no tape or the wrong tape in the tape drive amcheck just
> stalls but doesn't send email saying there is an error (no timeout?).

> 2. If I put a tape into the slot and run amcheck manually Amanda spits
> out the tape and asks me to put another one in, regardless if it's the
> right tape or not.

> 3.Sometimes the Dump doesn't finish correctly and amdump just stalls
> like amcheck and doesn't send error messages via email.

I do not use amcheck at all on my machine with a one-slot-no-robot tape
device. amcheck is run from amandauser's crontab and can therefore not
be interactive.

This is my amandauser's crontab entries:

        0 9 * * 1-5 /bin/mt -f /dev/nst0 offline
        0 0 * * 1-5 /usr/local/amanda/bin/amdump normal

I run backups from monday to friday, at 24:00 the backup starts and at 9:00
the 'mt offline' command spits out the tape. If there is any problems for
amdump you will get it in the mail report. So far the only problem i have had
is that i have forgotten to put in a new tape, and then amdump does a degraded
backup and complains in the mailreport. Then you need to do a amflush, and
when its done you will have to remember to switch to the right tape for the
next days backup, otherwise you will get the same situation next day again :)

You will also need to comment out "tpchanger" and "changerdev" in your
amanda.conf.

Good luck!
//Mats