--On Tuesday, January 11, 2005 21:55:45 -0700 Dwight Tovey <dwight AT dtovey 
DOT net> wrote:

> 
> Frank Smith said:
>> --On Tuesday, January 11, 2005 18:12:55 -0700 Dwight Tovey
>> <dwight AT dtovey DOT net> wrote:
>> 
> 
>> Are you sure your index files are good?  Do the files look like:
>> /somedir/file1
>> 
>> or is it more like:
>> 
>> 8945983969/somedir/file1
>> 
>> 
>> If your index files contain the large random leading numbers, you are
>> using a broken version of gnutar and amrecover won't work properly.
>> I believe it must be greater than or equal to 1.13.19. although I
>> recall problems with some of the 1.14 series as well.
>> 
> 
> Aha.  My Solaris system didn't have gnutar installed, so in the process of
> installing the Amanda client I had downloaded the source from gnu.org (the
> link on the Amanda installation notes pages wasn't responding at the
> time).  I assumed (bad idea) that this would be the latest working
> version, but it turns out that it was 1.13.  I've now downloaded the
> 1.13.25 source through the Amanda link, so I'll install that and see what
> I end up with.
> 
> Is this problem with the index files the only problem?  In other words,
> can I fix the index files by passing them through sed to remove that
> random number and then expect every thing else to be OK?

My faded memories here don't recall it being that simple.  All your data
is on the tapes, but in some cases the directories themselves were saved
as numbers.

Best solution is to fix your tar and use amadmin to force a level 0 on
the affected DLE's as soon as possible, and if you're lucky you won't
ever need to recover from those old tapes before you make it through
your tapecycle and overwrite them.  As you found out, it is possible
to get files from them, it's just more work.

Perhaps someone on the list has been bitten more recently and can give
you more details on the effects and workarounds.

Frank

> 
> Thanks for the response.
> 
>     /dwight
> 
> -- 
> Dwight N. Tovey
> email: dwight AT dtovey DOT net
> web: http://www.dtovey.net/~dwight
> -----------
> What I need is a list of specific unknown problems that we will encounter.