On 9/27/07, John E Hein <jhein AT timing DOT com> wrote:
> Indeed.  I was looking for the format documented in the .info
> pages for gnutar, but couldn't find it.

Not to toot my own horn, but there's a tool to display/edit these
numbers in the tar scripts/ directory.  It's available via CVS at
http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/*checkout*/tar/scripts/tar-snapshot-edit?revision=1.2&root=tar
The hand- (or sed-)editing of these files works fine, but the script
handles the various flavors, including those which use embedded NUL
bytes, etc.

> Supporting a per-DLE mode to [temporarily] ignore a change in devno in
> amanda should be easy.

See http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/Incremental-Dumps.html
-- it's actually not so easy, unfortunately.

> And maybe adding a "devno changed" check in amcheck would be nice -
> the client has the gnutar-list files, so it would require some work in
> the client side of amcheck.

This might be an interesting addition to the GNU Tar application, when
it's complete.  I'm not sure if there's a good way to stuff it into
the current implementation.

> For us, this was a large raid, so suffering through a couple days of
> huge incremental dumps was painful (particularly while getting 'dumps
> way too big' for some DLEs) and threw the balance out of whack.

Gene had similar problems -- it really throws Amanda off its stride.

Dustin

-- 
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com