I'm following up on an issue that was posted to this list back in
January:

> JLM pointed out another thing I did not know.  amcheck does not consider
> it an error for the file to not exist, it is listed as "optional".  But
> amcheck does consider it an error if the file has the wrong permissions
> or if it is unable to determine if it exists.

I'm running into exactly this problem.  In my dumptypes file, I have:

  exclude list optional ".amanda.exclude"

In my disklist file, I'm backing up individual home directories:

  arcadia /export/home/lars       comp-user-tar

Permissions on this directory are 750, so amcheck is failing:

  ERROR: backuphost: [Can't open exclude file
  '/export/home/lars/.amanda.exclude': Permission denied]

Of course, amcheck (and amandad) are running as user 'amanda' when running
this check, while the backup itself is performed as root (since the
'runtar' command is SUID root)

Presumably the backup should work just fine, even though amcheck is
complaining...right?

I'm hesitant to make things globally readable just to make Amanda work, so
I've worked around the problem on my Linux system using ACLs:

  setfacl -m u:amanda:rwx /export/home/*

-- Lars

-- 
Lars Kellogg-Stedman < lars (at) oddbit (dot) com >