On Thu, 13 Jan 2005, Jamie Wilkinson wrote:

So I had a crazy idea that hasn't yet been implemented, a pg dumper similar
in appearance to GNUTAR and DUMP on the client machine.  Your DLE would look
somethign like:

host database/table pg

where pg would be the dumptype telling amanda to use the pg dumper.

The net effect is that you'd get a hot snapshot written straight to amanda,
so you wouldn't have to worry about scheduling the dumps of each at the
right time.

If someone wants to beat me to the implementation though, please go right
ahead :-)

What you want is something called DUMPER-API.  Unfortunately it doesn't
actually exist.  It's documented but still waiting for someone to code it.

In the mean time, the standard workaround is to use the framework here:

  ftp://gandalf.cc.purdue.edu/pub/amanda/gtar-wrapper.*

This is a wrapper script that will pretend to be gnutar to amanda, but
run whatever you tell it to instead on the client.

-Mitch