NetWorker and Snow Leopard

I was rather pleased this morning to have a friendly FedEx courier drop off Mac OS X 10.6 – Snow Leopard.

Of course, my first thought was “will this work with NetWorker?”

I’m pleased to report – yes, yes it does. All of the following worked for me using NetWorker 7.5.1:

  • Recoveries from prior to the upgrade
  • Backups following the upgrade
  • Recoveries from new backups only
  • Recoveries that mixed old backups and new backups

(That’s just standard filesystem recoveries – I don’t use NetWorker for complete disaster recovery of Mac OS X as I feel that Time Machine is a much more appropriate system for those styles of recoveries.)

So, now we just need to wait for the software compatibility guide to be updated…

Note: The installer is very different under Snow Leopard, and no longer supports the old “Archive and Install” option; thus, when you finish the installation, there’s no need to actually re-install NetWorker; it remains there, and working, from the previous installation.

[Edit, 2009-09-04]

I can report one bit of odd experience with NetWorker under Snow Leopard. I was presenting a training course earlier in the week and wanted to change which hosts could backup the NetWorker client on my laptop. After editing the /nsr/res/servers file I found that the NetWorker client processes wouldn’t properly restart on the laptop. In the end, I did a new install of NetWorker onto the laptop, which fixed the problem. FYI, in case you notice similar things, reinstalling seems to fix the problem.

4 thoughts on “NetWorker and Snow Leopard”

  1. Were your tests with both a 7.5.1 client and 7.5.1 server? I’ve been installing the 7.5.1 client on my 10.5 servers, which has worked fine, but our NetWorker server is an EBS NetWorker server running 7.4.4.

  2. EBS 7.3 does not work it is dependent on Java 1.4.2 and that is absent in Snow Leopard…. how do i get around this without upgrading to EBS 7.4.4 or 7.5?

    -gerardo

    1. I don’t know. I don’t think you should be focusing too much effort on getting such an old/unsupported version to work with a new operating system – I think you’d be inviting problems. Furthermore, unless Sun have managed to swing something out of EMC, NetWorker 7.3, on which EBS 7.3 is based, is no longer supported. It would likely be better to upgrade your environment to a 7.4.x or 7.5.x release.

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