Okay, last year I had observed that perfectly valid gnutar exclude lists
were being ignored by amanda on Windows machines.  The best answer anyone
could give me was to build my own tar program that does the excludes, and
replace "runtar".

Well now I've enabled my first gnutar linux clients, and they are seeing
the exact same problem.  /tmp/amanda/sendsize.debug and runtar.debug both
show that the exclude list is being passed to tar, but they are ignored.

These systems I can test with to my heart's content, unlike those Windows
boxes, so tell me what you need to know.

And as I noted before, and someone tried to explain away, it appears that
the command line invocation for the exclude list is wrong (missing an equals)

runtar.20050601020202.debug:
        running: /bin/tar: gtar --create --file - --directory / 
--one-file-system --listed-incremental 
/var/lib/amanda/gnutar-lists/client-host3__0.new --sparse --ignore-failed-read 
--totals --exclude-from /etc/exclude.gtar . 

/etc/exclude.gtar
        $ cat /etc/exclude.gtar 
        ./*
        ,/
        *

disklist:
        client-host3         /                               user-tar

amanda.conf:

define dumptype root-tar {
    global
    program "GNUTAR"
    comment "root partitions dumped with tar"
    compress none
    exclude list "/etc/exclude.gtar"
    priority low
}

define dumptype user-tar {
    root-tar
    comment "user partitions dumped with tar"
    priority medium
}

-- 
Joe Rhett
senior geek
meer.net