+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #206979 +++ Description of problem: The GNU tar update to 1.15.91 a few days ago has broken my amanda backup system due to a switch to a different state file format. Specifically, from analysis of /var/log/amanda/ the problem is when sending sizes of level 1s (or above): sendsize[9076]: time 0.799: /bin/tar: Unexpected field value in snapshot file sendsize[9076]: time 0.799: /bin/tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now sendsize[9076]: time 0.800: ..... sendsize[9076]: estimate time for /home level 1: 0.004 sendsize[9076]: no size line match in /bin/tar output for "/home" From some searching, this is a known issue and caused the amanda people to issue 2.5.1 incorporating some sort of change to work around it: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/amanda-hackers/message/5149 However the real problem is in tar - it should not casually introduce a new file format breaking existing incremental dump state files. Either way, amanda backups using tar are non-functional on FC5 after this update. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 1.15.91 How reproducible: Requires incremental backup state files generated with an older tar. -- Additional comment from pvrabec on 2006-09-18 14:14 EST -- Jay, is it possible to upgrade amanda and solve this problem this way? -- Additional comment from fenlason on 2006-09-18 14:32 EST -- Amanda 2.5.1 (the one that's been fixed to work with the newer tar) was released after FC6T3 froze, so it's not going into FC6. It's significantly configuration-incompatible with 2.5.0p2, too, so pushing it as an update in FC5 would break all existing Amanda installations, not just ones that use gnutar as their dumper. I can look in to how much effort it'll take to backport the newer gnutar support from 2.5.1 to 2.5.0p2, but why oh why did you push a tar update that broke existing installations? -- Additional comment from rvokal on 2006-09-19 04:01 EST -- Heads up, this affects RHEL5 -- Additional comment from pvrabec on 2006-09-19 05:26 EST -- I have pushed new tar-1.15.91 update, because incremental backup in tar-1.15.90 didn't work properly (#206121). tar-1.15.91 was also pushed into RHEL-5 and FC-6, so we really need to solve this problem fast. Backporting the newer gnutar support from 2.5.1 to 2.5.0p2 seems to be best way. If it's not possible, we can either downgrade tar to version 1.15.1, which includes backporting some patches or start talking about amanda upgarade. -- Additional comment from jturner on 2006-09-19 10:20 EST -- Deferring QE ack until we have a solid proposal for how to address this problem.
Just a comment - I've been trying to get amanda 2.5.1 running to work around this issue and have already run into 2 critical bugs. Amanda 2.5.1 is nowhere near ready for prime time. However, maybe the changes to support tar 1.15.2 can be backported to amanda 2.5.0p2. I think all they involved was making amanda treat the tar snapshot files as opaque files and not making assumptions about their content. Haven't looked at the code yet though...
Created attachment 137231 [details] patch to copy tar snapshot files properly Here is a backported to 2.5.0p2 patch of the change made on July 14 2006 in amanda CVS to copy the snapshot files. Untested.
problem fixed with tar-1.15.1-15.FC5