man tar
      -C, --directory DIR
             change to directory DIR

It change the directory to '/data/nihpd/nihpd3/users' and then backup '.'

It is the expected behaviour.

The DLE should not be a symlink if you don't want to follow it.

Jean-Louis

Jean-Francois Malouin wrote:

A funny thing happened when I forced a full of a DLE on a client. I
had noticed a few days before that a user had moved the content of the
entire DLE (/data/nihpd/nihpd3/users) to another disk and replaced it
with a symlink pointing to its new location:

# ls -ld /data/nihpd/nihpd3/users
lrwxr-xr-x    1 root     sys           24 Sep 10 09:49
/data/nihpd/nihpd3/users -> /data/nihpd/nihpd1/users/

Now, I see in the amanda report that the dump size this DLE is 126GB.
Scary: looks like this version of gnutar (1.13.25) follows symlinks.
I always thought that this version was 'safe'...

I manually reran the gnutar sending the output to the bit bucket:

/usr/freeware/bin/tar --create --file /dev/null \
--directory /data/nihpd/nihpd3/users --one-file-system \
--sparse --ignore-failed-read --totals .
Total bytes written: 135834787840 (126GB, 1.7GB/s)

/usr/freeware/bin/tar --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.13.25

?!?

The sendbackup and runtar debug files on the client are attached.
Both server and client are at 2.5.2p1.

Any thoughts/comments?
jf