On 2006-05-26 00:23, William Yardley wrote:

I'm having problems restoring data from a particular machine / partition
using amanda and "restore".

$ amrestore -p /dev/nst0 somemachine /home  | /sbin/restore -ivf -
Verify tape and initialize maps
Input is from a local file/pipe
amrestore: missing file header block
amrestore:   2: skipping xxx._xxxx.20060524.1
amrestore:  10: reached end of information

running "mt tell" at this point:
At block 22

if I run the same thing a second time, I get:
[...]
Input is from a local file/pipe
amrestore: WARNING: not at start of tape, file numbers will be offset
amrestore:  10: reached end of information
/sbin/restore: Tape read error on first record

If I just do
$ amrestore -p /dev/nst0 | /sbin/restore -ivf -
the machine shown being skipped above is the first one that comes up. If
I then quit and restart, I can go through all the other hosts backed up
here one at a time; however this isn't very time-effective or convenient.

This is with RHEL4u3 (has always worked fine with RHEL3, and almost the
same versions - dump v 0.4b37 and same Amanda version).

dump-0.4b39-3.EL4.2

Amanda version is amanda-2.5.0p2, packaged locally.

Any ideas on what the problem might be?

I'm not sure, but could this be because you are using BSD semantics
instead of SYSV semantics on the tape drive? The manipulation of
a non-rewinding tape device is different:

- Rread some blocks of the tape in non-rewind mode
- Close and reopen the tape

SYSV-semantics: the close() above will position the tape at the
end of the current tape file, and the next read will return the first
blocks of the next tape file.

Have a look in your /etc/stinit.def file (man stinit).


--
Paul Bijnens, xplanation Technology Services        Tel  +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM    Fax  +32 16 397.512
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