You may have compilation errors on statfs.c if you're running, on a Solaris 2.6 host, a gcc that was not build on a Solaris 2.6 host. This happens because gcc stores fixed copies of some Solaris header files on an internal directory. You must rebuild gcc if you get this kind of trouble. Note, however, that gcc 2.7.2.3 does not support Solaris 2.6, you should upgrade to 2.8.0 or higher, or egcs.

You may get errors running make: Assure that you use the BSD-version of make, usually /usr/ccs/bin/make. Add /usr/ccs/bin to the path before running configure.

According to Julian Stevens <[email protected]>, the format of inetd on Trusted Solaris 1.2 is a bit different. Just before the user name, you should insert the word `untrusted':

amanda dgram udp wait untrusted amuser /usr/local/libexec/amandad amandad

The patch-system script is *NOT* aware of this detail; you must fix it yourself.

A bug in GNU-tar 1.12 causes it to miscalculate (in fact, to misreport) the size of filesystems. A patch for GNU-tar is available in the patches directory.

The Ultrix dump program contains an explicit check that it is being run by root. This defeats the usual practice of a non-root "operator" userid for dumps. For this reason, the rundump program (a setuid-root wrapper for dump) is enabled by default. If you find rundump is not necessary for you, just run

configure --without-rundump

The Ultrix restore program will fail if it is not connected to a tty. Since the restore program is invoked in the clients in order to create index files, and it the client is not connected to a tty, index creation will fail. Using GNU-tar instead of DUMP is an option. Thanks to Edwin Wiles <[email protected]> for the investigation. Another alternative proposed by Martyn Johnson <[email protected]> is to use a modified restore program: use a binary program editor and replace `/dev/tty' with `/dev/nul', for instance, and link /dev/nul to /dev/null. Note that the chosen file name must be exactly 8 bytes long, otherwise you'll break the restore program. A nice one-liner perl script by Martyn Johnson will do the trick (make sure you preserve a copy of the original restore program, it will be rewritten by running this script!):

perl -pi -e 'BEGIN { $/ = "/dev/tty" } s-$/-/dev/nul-' restore

The Ultrix C compiler seems to be too broken to compile Amanda. You are likely to need gcc or egcs.

You may run into an internal /bin/sh limit when running the configure script. The error message is:

./configure: sh internal 2K buffer overflow

Using /bin/posix/sh usually works around the problem. Another solution is to install GNU bash and use it instead of /bin/sh.

If `configure' complains about not finding `lex', you'll have to get `flex' installed. Look for its URL in Amanda Installation Notes.

If you use logical volumes, you may refer to mountpoints or full device pathnames instead of device names in the disk list file.

According to Stan Brown <[email protected]>, amverify won't work with HP/UX's stock mt. The work-around is to install GNU cpio, that contains an implementation of mt, and edit amverify so that MT points to GNU mt and MTOPT is `-f', or reconfigure and rebuild amanda from scratch, making sure it finds GNU mt before the stock mt in the PATH.

If you have vxfs filesystems to back up, Amanda will pick vxdump automatically.

GNU-tar 1.12 will incorrectly report the size of backups. There's a patch in the patches directory that fixes this problem.

The use of `amhpfixdevs' is deprecated, since you can list mount-points or full device names in the disklist. The script may be removed in future releases of Amanda.

Sometimes you may get the error message `Link severed' from an HP/UX client. This is just a cute name the developers of HP/UX found for `Network error'. Reported by Michael Brehl <[email protected]>

Linux hosts intended to back up efs partitions with dump should install the dump package, as it is not installed by default on most Linux distributions. It is possible to find compiled versions of dump on most Linux sites and CD-ROMs.

Note, however, that DUMP for Linux has been quite unreliable, sometimes being unable to perform backups, producing weird error messages such as `master/slave protocol botched', and sometimes creating unrestorable dump images, especially of active filesystems. The first problem can sometimes be fixed by cleaning up outdated entries in /etc/dumpdates, but your best bet is probably GNU-tar.

Make sure the user that runs configure has permission to run the dump program, otherwise configure may misdetect an ability of dump to accept a -E (for estimates) switch.

GNU-tar 1.11.8, distributed with some Linux versions, will cause index failures (Index returned -1). Upgrading to GNU-tar 1.12 fixes this problem. This is not a Linux-specific problem, but it is quite common in this platform.

Amanda now supports the ftape driver version 3.04d. It adjusts the blocksize automatically to 32k and supports QIC volume tables. More details can be found in the file ZFTAPE in this directory.

Some releases of dump for Linux, such as the one distributed with Debian 2.0, have modified dump so that it stores dumpdates in /var/lib. If this is your case, you should create a link to it in /etc. Suggested by David Wolfskill <[email protected]>

According to Michael Galloway <[email protected]>, the stock DUX4 dump is broken. There is a patch available at ftp://ftp.service.digital.com/public/dunix/v4.0b/duv40bas00005-19970926.README

When both dump and vdump are available, Amanda will use vdump for backing up advfs filesystems only, and dump will be used for the rest. If you'd rather back up all filesystems with vdump, #undef DUMP in config/config.h after running configure.

Unfortunately, the output of `dump -E' incorrectly matches a line of output from SAMBA, which gets Amanda's estimate process confused. client-src/sendsize.c will refuse to compile if both HAVE_DUMP_ESTIMATE and SAMBA_CLIENT are defined in config/config.h. Amanda will work correctly if you undefine HAVE_DUMP_ESTIMATE in config/config.h; if you prefer to have incorrect estimates for SAMBA backups, follow the instructions in client-src/sendsize.c on removing the compile-time error.

According to Oren Laadan <[email protected]>, DEC compiler version "DEC C V5.2-033 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (Rev. 564)" (obtained with "cc -V") does not build Amanda properly, in particular, taper.c. Using gcc is OK.

The use of `amsinixfixdevs' is deprecated, since you can list mount-points or full device names in the disklist. The script may be removed in future releases of Amanda.

Sinix port originally by Michael Schmitz <[email protected]>.

When setting the tape device name in either amanda.conf or one of the changer configuration files, make sure you specify the "variable" device name, which has a 'v' on the end. If not, IRIX will write 4KByte blocks instead of the 32KByte blocks Amanda tells it to. This apparantly works OK unless you take the tape to a non-IRIX system, where amrestore will complain about a short (4096) read.

If you do end up in this situation, the dd command to use to pipe into your system restore program is:

dd if=/dev/whatever bs=4k skip=8 | ...

Jean-Francois Malouin <[email protected]> reports that, if you are going to use an IRIX host as the tape server, you *must* patch your system with *all* kernel and scsi rollup patches, otherwise you may end up with useless tapes, due to tape rewinding after short periods of inactivity. See http://www-viz.tamu.edu/~sgi-faq/ for more details.

Some unpatched version of xfsdump are reported as not printing estimates. This causes estimates to take much longer than they had to, because backups are always performed twice. According to Mike Acar <[email protected]>, patch 2333 for IRIX 5.3 and 6.1 will fix this problem.

Seems like SGI make program is a bit broken, in a way that causes it to rebuild some files if doesn't have to if you happen to run make again. Using GNU make fixes this problem.

If you have xfs filesystems to back up, Amanda will pick xfsdump automatically.

Luc Lalonde <[email protected]> contributed the following notes:

If you use a jukebox, you must set the ownership of the robot-changer device to the Amanda operator:group in /etc/ioperms. Here's my configuration:

/etc/ioperms: /dev/scsi/sc8d6l0 0600 amanda backup

Otherwise the ownership:group is changed to "root:sys" after each reboot. When you do upgrades, check the file /var/sysgen/master.d/scsi to see if it has changed. Otherwise your jukebox could be rendered unuseable. In particular, check if it has been replaced by a new version and renamed to "./scsi.O/.".

If you use the Amanda package provided by freeware.sgi.com, you are not affected by the first question since at compile time the Amanda operator is "root:sys".

Jens Krause <[email protected]> has reported some problems with GNU-tar 1.12 on SCO Release 5. Although the `sparse' files patch was applied, GNU-tar would consistently crash. GNUtar had to be built linked with malloc-libraries, and the `--sparse' switches had to be removed from client-src/sendbackup-gnutar.c and client-src/sendsize.c.

chg-scsi was not updated to support the new camlib.h-dependent chio.h, so chg-scsi will be automatically disabled if camlib.h is found. You may use chg-chio instead.

Sep. 28th, 2004: Jason Miller <[email protected]> reported problems with setting up the Amanda-client on FreeBSD 4.9. He wrote:

Due to the need for read permissions for Amanda-client the default user and group for this on FreeBSD 4.9 is "operator:operator" which I found a write up on that as well. Just a note the port wanted to install it with these user permissions by default and I initially changed them to match my Redhat 9.0 install. So just doing a

fixed that for me. Then I just followed the below instructions and everything was good to go.

Refer to this link for more details: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=59302.

Nicolas Ecarnot <[email protected]> discovered that for FreeBSD 5.1 (maybe earlier, and surely further), you have to set the net.inet.udp.maxdgram TCP/IP variable to 65535. The default is 9216, and this is a problem when trying to backup a large number of clients as indicated by errors in during amcheck or the estimate phase.

You can just run the command:

but this won't last until the next reboot.

To make it permanent, just add this line:

net.inet.udp.maxdgram=65535

in the file /etc/sysctl.conf.

sendsize is reported to coredump on AIX 4.3.3, this is a linking problem, try configuring Amanda with the option "--disable-shared".

Although Amanda won't run standalone on MS-Windows hosts, it is possible to use it to back up their disks, by using SAMBA. Please read Backup PC hosts using Samba for more information.

SAMBA may be unable to back up some files due to file locking restrictions. Particularly, paging and registry files usually present problems. Backing up page files is pointless, but registry files are quite important to back up. It is possible to create regular files that contain registry information by using the Regback utility, from the Windows NT Resource Kit. Unfortunately, it is not part of the Windows NT standard distribution, you have to purchase it separately. Thanks to Ernie Oporto <[email protected]> for the tip.

For notes on how to setup Amanda under Apple's OS X, please refer to http://web.brandeis.edu/pages/view/Bio/AmandaMacOSXCompileNotes, written by Steven Karel<[email protected]>. Thanks to Jose L.Hales-Garcia <[email protected]> for the tip.