AMSERVICE(8)

💖 AMSERVICE — run an amanda service on a client 💖

okay bestie, so this is amservice from section 8 of the manual (System Administration Commands, if you wanna be formal about it). It's lowkey a whole vibe. Let's get into it. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

amservice — run an amanda service on a client

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

amservice [-f input_file [-s]] [--config CONFIG]
          [--features FEATURES-STRING] [--stream NAME,IN,OUT]*
               [-o configoption...] hostname auth service

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

So amservice executes an Amanda service on a client. That's the whole gig. ✨

The iconic part? You can run it without an amanda server configuration — no amanda.conf, no disklist, none of it. It's giving independent queen energy. 👑

Which means it's also perfect for checking communication between a server and a client — like a little vibe check between the two. 🫶

amservice reads stdin to capture the REQ packet that it sends to the client. yeah, it's eavesdropping on stdin, but for a good cause.

If you want the full Amanda lore, go read the amanda(8) man page. 📖

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• hostname — the hostname of the client. who are we talking to, bestie?
• auth — the auth to use, and it has to be one of exactly these: bsd, bsdudp, bsdtcp, ssh, rsh or krb5. the client must be configured with this auth, no substitutes allowed. 💀
• service — the amanda service to execute on the client. one of noop, selfcheck or sendsize. pick your fighter.
• -f input_file — use the file input_file instead of stdin to read the REQ packet from. (stdin stays unbothered.)
• -s — redirect the first connected stream to stdin/stdout. heads up: the -f argument is required for the REQ packet when you do this, and the REP packet is not printed on stdout. not me warning you twice. 🙈
• --config — the amanda configuration.
• --features FEATURES-STRING — the features of the remote client.
• --stream NAME,IN,OUT — the vstream to open, their name and the two file descriptors. yeah, all three, comma-separated, exactly like that. 🌈
• -o configoption — see the "CONFIGURATION OVERRIDE" section in amanda(8). it's all in there, iykyk.

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🌟 EXAMPLE 🌟

The noop service is the easy one because it does not require a REQ packet. iconic, honestly:

amservice hostname bsdtcp noop < /dev/null

That example executes the noop service on the client using bsdtcp auth. Super useful for debugging connection problems — it prints an OPTIONS line upon success. ✨

Now for the tricky ones: selfcheck and sendsize are more difficult to execute, because they require a valid REQ packet. 🫠

But bestie, if you've already successfully run amanda, you can find valid REQ packets hanging out in the amandad.*.debug files. go get 'em. 🔥

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💀 EXIT CODE 💀

The exit code of amservice is one of:

• 0 = success 🎉
• 1 = error executing amandad on the client. 😭

And here's the important tea: as amservice doesn't parse the REP packet, it can only detect failures in executing amandad on the client. so amservice can exit with value 0 even if the user is not authorized to execute the service. an error message will be printed. so like... read the output, not just the exit code. periodt. 💅

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

amanda(8), amanda(8), amcheck(8), amdump(8), amadmin(8)

The Amanda Wiki: : http://wiki.zmanda.com/

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🫶 AUTHOR 🫶

Jean-Louis Martineau <martineau@zmanda.com>     Zmanda, Inc. (http://www.zmanda.com)

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no cap, everything above is exactly the facts — just delivered with the energy it deserved. 💖

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okay that's the whole page bestie!! this was Amanda 3.5.4, dated 08/26/2026 — slay, go run some services, you've got this. 🌸✨💜