Thanks to all. I think both Frank and Joshua are pointing to the right 
direction. I am using GNU-tar, but root on NFS client doesn't have root 
privilege on exported partition.  Since this is kind a security measure, I 
probably will not change this. So I am going to set up a backup client on the 
NFS file server.

Though this pose another issue. Amanda manual specificly mentioned that 
tar-1.13.9x may have problem on creating index list. Unfortunately the NFS 
server has a tar-1.13.93 on it. Actually this is one of the reasons I chose 
the host as the clinet, -- the amanda host machine has a tar-1.13.25, which 
is recommended by amanda team :). Just wondering if anyone did encounter this 
problem before. But anyway, I am going to get this resolved and use 1.13.25 
for this task.

Cheers,
Jingchun

On Wednesday 09 February 2005 15:52, Frank Smith wrote:
> --On Wednesday, February 09, 2005 15:16:15 -0500 Jingchun Chen 
<chen.666 AT osu DOT edu> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Greetings to everyone! I am new to Amanda, and new to this mailing list.
> >
> > I got a planner failure and empty schedule. Amcheck seems to pass ok
> > (except the two non-existing log dirs which I assume shouldn't cause
> > problem). The tape server and backup client are the same machine, and the
> > two disks to be backed up are NFS exported from another machine. We are
> > running Debian, kernel 2.4.28 on Amanda server (hostname coil) and kernel
> > 2.6 on the NFS server.
> >
> > Any clue? Thanks.
>
> Two possibilities I can think of:
> First, are you trying to use dump  on the NFS mount?  If so,
> you need to use tar.
> Second, if you are using tar, is the NFS mount on the remote
> host exported with the no_root_squash option (on Linux, it
> has other names on other OSs, root= on Solaris and NetApps)
> so that root on the NFS client has root access to the files.
>
> Frank