All,
First I'd like to express my appreciation to this list and all who replied / read my novice ramblings and pleas for help. All responses were a real pick me up while I was in despair.
[sorry if this is long winded]
Ok now to the fix...
It really boiled down to the damn fifo and my lack of understanding them. Unfortunately I'm not the kind of person who can read a manual and readily grasp it's concepts, I'm more of "lets do it first and see what happens" type of guy.
I never did figure out how to restore just the tar file w/o using a fifo. All config variations kept giving the same behaviour. I could watch the Storage Daemon read the Bacula volume and I saw where Bacula created the named pipe "file". The process wasn't putting the streaming data into the pipe. While I could not find where the data type was set, I agree that FT_FIFO type must have been the cause of this stubborn behaviour. Very frustrating...
So I was schooled by one a senior developer at work on named pipes, un-named pipes, and fifo behaviour. Now the words in the manual made a little more sense.
So it starts in the ClientRunBeforeJob in the MailRestore.bash script. The previous admin used fifo and set up the job just like the instructions said. Specifically opening a named pipe with the mkfifo cmd then running a tar xpf of that named pipe. This put the Bacula backup job back in the original directory. Since I didn't have the original dir my efforts in relocating the data and just getting a "tar" file were folly. Recall I changed 2 things in the Bacula restore, restore client and location. This was needed because the original location was no longer available.
The restore was looking for a process reading from the fifo [as was suggested by Martin]
2 changes were needed in the MailRestore.bash. 1) [this was probably not really needed but done anyway] Modified a path statement to match what was changed when I mod'd the restore option in the Bacula restore. 2) [the biggie] replaced the "tar xpf" line with a "cat > mail.tar" line
[Original] tar -xpf ${fifoDir}/mail.tar </dev/null &
[New] cat ${fifoDir}/mail.tar > mail1.tar 2> mail1.err </dev/null &
This worked!! I now have my data in a tar file. Yes, I've extracted the contents and all looks good.
Thank you again for all the comments and help. I'm sure I'll be back with more adventures.
Respectfully,
--Kenny