Thanks to all the help from this mailing list now my Amanda seems to be 
running smoothly. However, when I ran amrecover to recover files from tapes 
(hard drives actually), I got this tar message for all the regular files I am 
trying to retrieve, "implausibly old time stamp 1969-12-31 19:00:00". No 
complaints for all the directories or subdirectories, except at the end, when 
the very top level directory also got this message.

But it seems to recover all the files successfully. Of course the files can't 
be that old, since I wasn't even born in 1969 :). Is it tar or amanda's 
problem? I am using gtar-1.13.25 on the tape server and gtar-1.13.93 on the 
client. I know Amanda manual mentioned that gtar-1.13.9x is having problem 
creating index list. But is this message related to that bug?

Thanks.

Transcript:

amrecover> extract
amrecover: warning: using /dev/null as the tape device will not work

Extracting files using tape drive /dev/null on host coil.
The following tapes are needed: normal104

Restoring files into directory /root
Continue [?/Y/n]?

Extracting files using tape drive /dev/null on host coil.
Load tape normal104 now
Continue [?/Y/n/s/t]?
./jchen/lab/
./jchen/lab/administrivia.solly/
./jchen/lab/administrivia.solly/critical-files/
./jchen/lab/administrivia.solly/critical-files/Xfree/
./jchen/lab/administrivia.solly/critical-files/amanda/
tar: ./jchen/lab/administrivia.solly/critical-files/Xfree: implausibly old 
time stamp 1969-12-31 19:00:00
....
tar: ./jchen/lab: implausibly old time stamp 1969-12-31 19:00:00
>amrecover