On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:28:54AM -0700, Jerome Pioux wrote:
> Frank, Jon
> 
> >...
> >or possibly an OS that refuses to create a link to a non-existent target
> >...
> 
> Well, you may have pointed out the real problem above.
> 
> The way the restore went, filesystems with links may have been restored
> first and pointing, at the time, to non exiting targets (btw: the os was
> AIX53). To make the matter worse, I can see now that most of the links are 
> also
> links to other locations. Now I bet that the explanation above is the right 
> one !
> 
> I will run a few tests with amanda to verify the theory and base on the 
> results,
> will probably be doing some changes in the order we restore things from now 
> on...


I've not run across a system that did not allow symlinks to be created
to non-existing entries.  So I peeked at IBM's website for aix53 docs.
According to the ln(1) manpage:

   "The source file does not need to exist
    before creating the symbolic link."

Looking at lower levels, at the link(3) and symlink(3) manpages,
I see nothing contrary to that statement.  

I'd be more inclined to suspect problems with gnutar.  As one emperical
test, get/build a copy of 1.13.25 rather than 1.15.1.  See if that version,
which many amanda sites use, acts differently.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)