On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 4:56 PM, Mister Olli <mister.olli AT googlemail DOT 
com> wrote:
>  I had a look at into the '/tmp/amanda/client/weekly/sendbackup*' files,
>  and they all show the same failure:
>  sendbackup: time 89.994: index tee cannot write [Broken pipe]
>
>  Also this failure occurs constantly around second 89 to 90.

Hmm.. this sounds like a network/firewall issue to me, with a 90
second timeout.  Have you had a look at the packet dump between the
server and the client? Are reply packets being dropped?  Amanda's
STARTUP_TIMEOUT is 60s, so this is probably some other timeout.

>  >From what the VMvware support told me the ESX system is based on RedHat
>  3 Update 6. Is it possible/ likely that they applied some (custom)
>  patches to gtar?

RHEL3 is where I found tar-1.13.25, too.  As I mentioned, my copy of
this version of tar didn't exhibit this problem, and 1.13.25 has been
tested to work properly with Amanda.  All of the virtual machines I've
ever used were manually installed, so I have no idea what a VMware
distro would include.

Could you try
  strace -f tar -cf - . 2>/tmp/trace | true; tail /tmp/trace
and see what happens?

Dustin

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