On Mon, 30 Jan 2006, Kosa Attila wrote:
> Environment:
> - server
>       - Debian Sarge, amanda-server 2.4.4p3-3;
> - client
>       - Debian Sarge, amanda-client 2.4.4p3-3;
>       - Debian Woody, amanda-client 2.4.4p3-3 (I made it myself
>         backport).
> 
> The clients' full backup is succesful with the following config
> (typically reiserfs partitions are required to backup):
> 
> define dumptype myconfig {
>  program "GNUTAR"
>  comment "partitions dumped with tar"
>  options no-compress, index, exclude-list "/etc/amanda/exclude.gtar"
>  priority high
>  dumpcycle 0
>  maxcycle 0
> }
> 
> I tried to restore the full backup by 3.7 Knoppix CD, and I
> succeeded, but there is only one mistake. Uid/gid pairs in the
> Knoppix system are different than in my Woody (or Sarge) system,
> therefore certain parts of the restored system are not able to
> work. I think it would be a solution if the tar used also a
> --numeric-owner option to backup. I wonder if the only
> possibility to do it is rewriting the source or there is any
> simpler method I didn't notice.

I saw a similar thing when the disk of my backup server died last month.
The machine ran Debian testing, and I used an Ubuntu Live CD (the Knoppix I had
lying around didn't support SATA) to do the restore.

After the restore, some services didn't work because some configuration files
were owned by the wrong user.

I ended up comparing the uids and gids in /etc/passwd and /etc/group on the
restored image and on the Ubuntu Live CD, and for all differences, manually
verifying all uids and gids of all restored files and directories. Fortunately
this took much less time than expected :-)

I noticed one very strange thing though: uids and gids were not changed in a
consistent way: some files had the incorrect uid or gid from Ubuntu, while
other related files that should have the same uid/gid had the one from the
original system. So sometimes uids/gids were remapped during restore, but not
always...

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                                                Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert AT linux-m68k 
DOT org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                                            -- Linus Torvalds