I am using an amanda 2.5 server on a FreeBSD 6.2 host. I have some
FreeBSD 5.3 clients running the amanda 2.4.4 client side version. I also
have an old BSD/OS machine running some flavor of amanda client.

I noticed that the dumps use the "ushf" options. But it would seem to me
that you'd also want the -L option as mentioned on the FreeBSD machine's
dump command man page:


    -L      This option is to notify dump that it is dumping a live
            file system.  To obtain a consistent dump image, dump takes
            a snapshot of the file system in the .snap directory in the
            root of the file system being dumped and then does a dump of
            the snapshot.  The snapshot is unlinked as soon as the dump
            starts, and is thus removed when the dump is complete.  This
            option is ignored for unmounted or read-only file systems. 
            If the .snap directory does not exist in the root of the
            file system being dumped, a warning will be issued and the
            dump will revert to the standard behavior. This problem can
            be corrected by creating a .snap directory in the root of
            the file system to be dumped; its owner should be ``root'',
            its group should be ``operator'', and its mode should be
            ``0770''.

This seems like a good option to use when running backups on the FreeBSD
clients.

Any amanda users out there know how to get amanda to use the -L option
on the FreeBSD machines, but not on the BSD/OS machine, since it can't
do snapshots ?

It'd be nice if there were a dumps option capability on a per-hot basis.
I'd guess that'd need to be a dumptype option, but I can't find a way to
control the options to the client's dump command from the server.

Thanks
        Chris Kottaridis    (chriskot AT quietwind DOT net)