No index records for host-disk

This article is a part of the Troubleshooting collection.

Problem

amrecover(8) gives

No index records for host: hostname. Have you enabled indexing?

or

No index records for disk: disk. Invalid?

Explanation

• The most common cause of this problem is not having enabled index generation in amanda.conf(5). The index yes option must be present in every dumptype for whose disks indexes should be generated. Indexes are currently generated at backup-time only, so, if a backup was performed without creating an index, you won't be able to use amrecover(8) to restore it; you'll have to use amrestore(8).
• Amrecover is not selecting the configuration name that contains the backups for the selected disk. User can specify a configuration name with the `-c' switch to amrecover.
• Check for SELinux AVC Denied messages in /var/log/messages. Depending on how the index files are labeled, SELinux may be preventing amanda from accessing the index files. setenforce 0 disables enforcing mode. On Fedora Core distribution, do setsebool -P amanda_disable_trans 1 as superuser (to disable amanda policies only).
• Amrecover is contacting the wrong index server. Note that some packaged distributions have "localhost" as compiled in default index server. Specify the index server and tape server explicitly with:

# amrecover Config -s amandaserver.example.com -t amandaserver.example.com

To find the builtin default values for the above do:

$ amadmin x version | grep DEFAULT_CONFIG
$ amadmin x version | grep DEFAULT_SERVER
$ amadmin x version | grep DEFAULT_TAPE_SERVER

The first command shows the default configuration, the second command shows the default index server, and the last command shows the default tape server.

• If there are defunct processes running on the Amanda client after amrecover command failure, the directory where data is being restored to is not writable. Check the directory/file permissions. During the backup operation, the client uses the /tmp/amanda directory, and it must be writable by the Amanda user to create indexes. If amrecover is restoring files to /tmp, then it must be writable.

• If the index server has a small /tmp partition, and the disk you are trying to recover has a very large number of files, the /tmp partition may be filling up on the index server.