Hi,

>   I have a Promise SmartStor, a network drive.  It's NFS mounted on
> a Red Hat server.  Sometimes it gets backed up, other times I get:
> 
>   whimsy.med.utah.edu    /sstore/9gb  lev 0  FAILED [dumper returned FAILED]
>   whimsy.med.utah.edu    /sstore/9gb  lev 0  FAILED [data timeout]
>   whimsy.med.utah.edu    /sstore/9gb  lev 0  FAILED [cannot read header: got 
> 0 instead of 32768]
>   whimsy.med.utah.edu    /sstore/9gb  lev 0  FAILED [too many dumper retry: 
> "[request failed: timeout waiting for REP]"]

Just a wild guess, but a Google search yesterday on "cannot read
header: got 0 instead of " lead me to problems with IPv6/IPv4.

I recompiled Amanda to use only IPv4 (./configure --without-ipv6) and
the problem is gone.

To further diagnoze the problem, look at the debug files, you would
see that one side of Amanda opened a socket on IPv6:

   amandad.20080821100912.debug:amandad: time 2.679: stream_server: waiting for 
connection: ::.51629

while the other side try to connect on IPv4:

   dumper.20080821100912.debug:dumper: connected to 10.41.170.14.51629

I used information from
http://archive.netbsd.se/?ml=pkgsrc-users&a=2008-02&t=6414321

As you don't mention anything about the operating system of the server
and the client, I don't know if that helps. I am running FreeBSD 6.3
on both sides.

Best regards,

Olivier