Thanks to Jon LaBadie, Gene Heskett, and Jean-Louis Martineau for replies. Jean-Louis supplied me with a patch which I modified slightly and that I'm now using.
It turns out that some code in server-src/driver.c will allow a dump to be retried indefinitely, if dumper returns TRYAGAIN and taper returns DONE. See around line 2203 in 2.4.4p3 server-src/driver.c. I've been using amanda for years with real tapes but I've just started using vtapes this past week and this is the first time I've noticed such behaviour. This is a working amanda configuration that I've used to dump many hundreds of gigabytes already, both to real tapes in the past and to vtapes in recent days. But consistently with vtapes, if a client is alive during planning and was added to the schedule, and then this client goes offline before the dump starts, this condition will occur whereby dumper says TRYAGAIN, taper says DONE, forever until killed (or until taper gets an error for some other reason I guess). -- Todd Pfaff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Research & High-Performance Computing Support ABB 132, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, L8S 4M1 phone: voice: 905-525-9140 ext 22920 fax: 905-528-3773