Mystery of Extended Attributes

[Timothy Murphy]

When using dump/restore to copy a file-system recently,
I got hundreds of warnings like

restore: lsetxattr ./tftpboot/vmlinuz failed: Operation not supported

In spite of this, the copy worked faultlessly as far as I can see.

I was told that these warnings referred to "extended attributes"
but I have been unable to find any such attributes on my system.
I "yum install"-ed attr.i386 2.4.28-1.2
but "getfattr -d <filename>" and "attr -l <filename>"
give me absolutely nothing for any file on the system.

According to "man getfattr" 
this command should at least return the filename
but in my case it returns nothing.

Can someone enlighten me on this phenomenon.
I was running FC-4 when I got the warnings,
but am now running FC-5.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland