On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 2:11 PM, stan<stanb AT panix DOT com> wrote:
> What do I need to do to coerce Amanda into using this?

Try running the shell snippet from configure manually:

              case `"$GNUTAR" --version 2>&1` in
               *GNU*tar* | *Free*paxutils* )
                            echo OK, it is GNU tar
                            break
                            ;;
               *)
                            echo warning..
                            ;;
              esac

Dustin

-- 
Open Source Storage Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com