Hi there. I backup a system, and I notice that it complains about 'unusual or strange backup result' during the email. These are files I forgot to exclude; things like logs, that change during the backup. So, I added them to /etc/exclude.gtar which is defined properly in amanda.conf in 'server-tar', the exclude.gtar is stored at the client, and I am running the client as root (so that it has access to everything), and amcheck shows no problems. yet, every day I keep getting complaints about the same files; like ./apache/cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/sessions/blah has changed. well, in exclude.gtar I have: ./apache/cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/sessions and I assumed that this should have stopped everything under 'sessions' from being backed up?
I checked the wording, in fact, I did cut/paste from the error emails. I'm obviously missing something! Can anyone help?
Obviously there is something wrong. But besides telling us everything is allright, you didn't prove it to us. Show the exact errors, show the exact configs, instead of saying "they are defined properly". Also mentioning the program version(s) can help sometimes. In the worst case, you get a second opinion about the correctness, and in the best case, we notice the error.
One strange thing already is that you run the client as root. That's not the way it should be done. In fact there is code in amandad.c (line 148-167) to avoid this. The "runtar" and "rundump" programs in libexec should be installed suid-root however, just to overcome the limitation about access to all files.
But I guess this has nothing to do with the exclude problem.
A common error with excludes is the omission of the "list" keyword when specifying a file with a list of excludes.
hour.host /the/directory { comp-user-tar exclude list "/etc/exclude.gtar" }
Without the "list" keyword, the file itself would be excluded, which actually never matches, because the patterns need to start with a dot.
-- Paul @ Home