Hi Frank,

> >>>>> ## This is from the changer.debug
> >>>>> MT -> /usr/local/amanda/sbin/ammt -f
> >>>>> DD -> /usr/local/amanda/sbin/amdd
> >>>>> Args -> -slot next
> >>>>>      -> rewind /dev/nsa0
> >>>>> /dev/nsa0 rewind failed: Permission denied
> >>>> Looks like this is your main problem, you don't have permissions to
> >>>> the tape drive.  Odd, since you say you are running amrecover as
> >>>> root.  Is the tape actually loaded in the drive?  Can you (from the
> >>>> command line) run 'mt -f /dev/nsa0 rewind' successfully?
> >>> I agree, however from the command line I have full access:
> >> On poking around my installation, the changer scripts are all
> >> owned by my Amanda user, not root.  Can you 'su -' to your Amanda
> >> user and still run these commands?
> 
> Easiest fix is probably add your user 'backup' to whatever group has
> write permissions to your tape drive.  I believe the docs recommend
> making your backup user a member of whatever group owns the devices
> on your OS to avoid problems such as this.  You may also run into

I missed this step. I'll have another read over it to ensure I haven't
mucked anything else up :(

> permissions problems on your backups as well.  The tar wrapper is
> suid root so it won't care, but if you use dump it needs access to
> the disk device and can fail on permissions.
>    Not sure which fix I would recommend. If adding backup to the
> group owning the tape device solves your problem, then go with that,
> but if you foresee  future issues with dump (I'm assuming the backup
> group doesn't own your disks) you might want to go through the pain
> of changing backup's group and chgrp-ing all Amanda's files.

Many thanks for your advice. I've managed to get it to work by the addition
of the backup user to the operator group - the same one which has permission
to read/write on the tape drive.

It seems Amanda is going through the process of reading the whole tape and
therefore will take several hours to restore about 10Mb in selected files?

My tape only seems to work at about 3 Mbps. The scsi disks it reads from
(holding space) and writes to are capable of much more than that (U320, raid
5 array). 

JB