After installing the amanda client, amcheck from the server fails because the operator account home directory in RedHat 7.0 is /root, which is owned by root instead of operator. Changing the operator home directory to another directory (/home/operator), making amanda the owner, making sure it is not group or world writable, then moving .amandahosts to it fixes this problem. It might be better to use a separate amanda account (make sure it is in group disk, of course). Also, the /etc/xinetd.d/amanda file isn't created if you just install amanda and amanda-client (this has already been reported through bugzilla, however). amanda-client also does not create /var/lib/amanda/gnutar-lists and make amanda the owner (which is used if you use gnu tar for backups instead of dump). Finally, with gnu-tar you get warnings when amanda is run like: ? gtar: ./tmp/.X11-unix/X0: socket ignored This is a known amanda problem and can be fixed by patching client-src/sendbackup-gnutar.c and adding: { DMP_NORMAL, ": socket ignored", 1}, right before the line: #ifdef IGNORE_SMBCLIENT_ERRORS
All but changing the operator home directory are fixed in amanda-2.4.2-0.19991216beta1.1.
the amanda operator home dir is another slight problem if you already have an .amandahosts file - b/c it runs as a script to update that file you run the risk of munging the hell out of it. make it an actual file so in the event it installs it can be saved as a .rpmsave or a .rpmnew otherwise you end up with a kludged file - and on the client as well. your best bet is to leave .amandahosts alone and not add anything to it.
All of this should be fixed in amanda 2.4.2-2, coming soon to a rawhide near you.
I've "fixed" this by: 1) ensuring operator is in the "root" group (it should be) 2) making sure /root is g+rx 3) adding the line "groups = yes" for /etc/xinetd.d/amanda (and other amanda services). This tells xinetd to give the service all supplemental groups for the user specified. Now, since /root is g+rx, the service can read the .amandahosts file. Having an "amanda" user is probably optimal, but the above is a nice quick workaround.
A amanda user was added in the RPMs I referred to