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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nathan Stratton Treadway - natha...@ontko.com - Mid-Atlantic region Ray Ontko & Co. - Software consulting services - http://www.ontko.com/ GPG Key: http://www.ontko.com/~nathanst/gpg_key.txt ID: 1023D/ECFB6239 Key fingerprint = 6AD8 485E 20B9 5C71 231C 0C32 15F3 ADCD ECFB 6239