On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 10:53:34 +1200, Steve Wray wrote:
> I have some servers running Debian Etch. They have been fine with amanda 
> for a very long time now.
> 
> I just ran an apt-get upgrade to apply some security patches and suddenly 
> I'm getting the old "file changed as we read it" and "error [/bin/tar 
> returned 1]" again. I'd hoped to see the last of this.
[...]
> Package: amanda-client
[...]
> Version: 1:2.5.1p1-2.1
> 
> Package: tar
[...]
> Version: 1.16-2etch1
> 

It sounds like you ran into this same problem some time earlier.  Did
you make any changes at that time in order to get things working?

When I faced this problem as part of upgrading to Etch, it seemed that
the only (reasonable) solution was to upgrade the amanda-client package
to version 2.5.1p2 or later.  (See, for example, 
  
http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/FAQ:What_versions_of_GNU_Tar_are_Amanda-compatible%3F
.)  We ended up just pulling the "1:2.5.1p3-2" package out of Sid and
putting it into a local repository to use in place of the one in Etch.

So, in short, unless you changed something else to work around this
problem, I wouldn't expect the two package versions you list above to
work together correctly...  

On the other hand, this incomptibility only causes a problem if some
files actually change while tar is reading them, so on a quiet system
the plain Etch packages will sometimes run for long stretches without
triggering this failure.

What files are now triggering this issue on your machine?  Could it be
that the security updates you installed restarted some daemon that
hadn't been running before (some daemon which is now updating its log
file while tar is running), or something like that?

                                                Nathan

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