> Some of you might remember I'm piecing together a previous, non-working,
> installation of amanda.  The help I've received off here has been great,
> so thanks again!  The next piece in this puzzle is a FreeBSD (5.4)
> machine that appears to have amanda already installed.

First question is how was it installed? From the ports or from the
source?

If it si from the ports, it should be reported by pkg_info|grep amanda

> I can't find any documentation on getting the client working on BSD so
> started going by all the information I've gleened troubleshooting the
> Linux machines here.  I can't find a .amandahosts file, do I need to
> create this and if so where?  Or should this information go somewhere
> else?

Cleints are working the same way on Linux or on FreeBSD (that is if
you know how to install a cleint by hand).

Assuming that amanda has been build with user amanda and group
amanda...

.amandahosts should go in the home directory of the user amanda on the
client. It should be chown'ed to amanda:amanda and contains a line
saying something like

server.you.domain.com amanda

banyan<root>: ls -l .amandahosts
-rw-r--r--  1 amanda  amanda  31 Oct 31  2005 .amandahosts

if amanda on your server was compiled for the user amanda.

In /etc you need to create an empty file called amandadates

banyan<root>: ls -l /etc/amandates 
-rw-r--r--  1 amanda  amanda  494 May  2 01:29 /etc/amandates
 
It should belongs to amanda:amanda

In /etc/inetd.conf you must have a line saying

amanda  dgram   udp     wait    amanda  /usr/local/libexec/amanda/amandad 
amandad

with the correct path to amandad.

You must make sure inetd is running (disabled by default on some
security models, re-enable it in /etc/rc.conf)

In /usr/local/var create amanda directory and in /usr/local/var/amanda
create gnu-tar directory. Everything chown'ed to amanda:amanda

> I assume /tmp/amanda should exist on the machine and be writable and
> ownder by operator:operator (operator being the default username the
> client seems to install by, and operator being BSD's equiv of 'disk'
> group), is this so?

/tmp/amanda is created automatically by the first run of amanda.

That's all IO can think about right now.

Bests,

olivier