I'm looking at using Amanda for my backup solution, and I've run into a
bit of a problem that I'm hoping to get some help with.

My tape server (and currently only client) is running Red Hat Linux 7.3. 
It has a 4mm DAT tape drive, which means that I can get up to about
8Gb/tape.  One of my filesystems is 20Gb and currently holds about 9Gb of
data.  Since Amanda doesn't support spanning tapes, I tried to break this
filesystem into chunks using the example that was in the sample 'disklist'
file:

medea /home/dwight /home {
    comp-high-tar
    comment "Dwight home"
    include "./dwight"
    exclude "./dwight/downloads" "./dwight/News"
} 2 eth0

medea /home/public /home {
    comp-high-tar
    comment "Public directories"
    include "./samba" "./httpd"
} 2 eth0

medea /home/all /home {
    comp-high-tar
    comment "Home filesystem"
    exclude "./dwight" "./samba" "./httpd"
} 2 eth0


The problem here is that my backup user does not have read access to all
of the directories in this filesystem, so the backups fail.  It looks to
me like normally Amanda wants to just use the disk device (/dev/hda6 for
example) instead of the mountpoint (/home) since the backup user has read
access to the device by being in the 'disk' group.

If I try to use the device instead of the mountpoint, amcheck (and
eventually amdump) fails with "Can't open disk 'hda6'" for each 'include'.
 Looking at the source I found that every time it encounters an 'include',
Amanda trys to do an 'opendir()' to verify the included name.  Since the
device is not a directory, the opendir() fails resulting in the displayed
error.

So, is there any way around this short of running Amanda as 'root'?  Is
there really any problem with running as root?

Thanks in advance for any help/advice.

    /dwight

-- 
Dwight N. Tovey
email: dwight AT dtovey DOT net
web: http://www.dtovey.net/~dwight
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Diplomacy: The art of letting someone else have your way.