->>In response to your message<<-
  --received from Jean-Louis Martineau--
>
> 
> >I have been seeing the same thing for about two weeks.
> >
> >I'm running Fedora Core 5, and the same version of Amanda. Last night
> >my computer crashed, so I ran fsck on everything. There were numerous
> >errors on my / file system, where /var/lib/amanda resides. If those
> >were real errors I would think that fsck would have caught them.
> >
> >I note in my yum.log:
> >
> >Oct 07 08:58:06 Updated: tar.i386 2:1.15.1-15.FC5
> >
> >I started seeing those error messages after October 7.
> >
> >Possibly this is a bug in the latest FC5 tar? I'll check bugzilla
> >later today.
> >  
> It's not a tar bug.
> 
> amanda-2.5.0p1 and previous are incompatible with the newer tar.
> You should downgrade your tar or upgrade amanda to 2.5.1p1.

I've had problems between amanda and tar 1.15 with a version of amanda
greater than this, specifically 2.5.0p2-1.  The specific release of
tar 1.15 that gave me trouble, however, was 1.15.91.  I had to
downgrade to 1.15.1 to relieve the problem.  There is a short thread on
this started about a month ago subjected 'Amanda error "Unexpected
field value..."'

My current amanda version is 2.5.0p2-2.1.  Do you think I would still
need 2.5.1p1 or later to avoid this problem with tar version 1.15.91 or
later again?

This is all with Debian Etch.

Now I'm experiencing similar problems again as explained in this thread
but with Fedora 5 boxes.

I find it a bit bothersome that not just one but two linux
distributions are releasing packages of incompatible versions of tar
and amanda.  I suppose this is reasonable considering the complexity of
the issue and that both are progressive versions of the distributions?

Paul

> 
> >Things I have not yet tried: rolling back to the previous version of
> >tar; deleting the offending files.
> >  
> You will also need to remove the file without the '.new' suffix. You 
> should keep only the files that are pure ascii, remove all binary files.
> 
> Jean-Louis
>