As a long term Unix admin, it’s frustrating when there are commands on my systems for which there aren’t man pages. As a long-term NetWorker user, it’s equally frustrating when there aren’t man pages for particular NetWorker commands.
When I’ve discussed this in the past, I’ve usually had a response of “that’s because you shouldn’t be running that command”. That’s a bad response. The correct response should be something along the lines of “oops, we’ll write a man page for the next release that states:
That command is for internal NetWorker use only. It does X. It should not be run manually.”
Having undocumented commands that give no output, hang or produce strange results is just inviting frustration. Of just the nsr prefixed commands, on my current 7.6 lab server, the following commands are undocumented:
- nsravamar
- nsravtar
- nsrbmr
- nsrcatconfig
- nsr_cp_install
- nsrdmpix
- nsrdsa_recover
- nsrdsa_save
- nsrfile
- nsrfsra
- nsrlmc
- nsrndmp_2fh
- nsrrcopy
- nsrrcopy2
- nsrvcbserv_tool
So out of the 55 nsr prefixed commands I have on my server, 15 (or 27%) are undocumented.
Note to EMC: This does not produce a healthy level of trust. Please – get some documentation on these commands, even if that documentation gives us a one line overview of where they’re used and tells us not to run them ourselves.
Here is some reply over such commands, I don’t like there answer, but so it is until now:
One command nsrlmc you can find on page 14 in the NW License manager 0th edition Installtion/Admin Guide, the rest I believe are more processes that are integration links to various applications connected to NetWorker such as ndmpix(NDMP), nsravamar(Avarmar), nsrvcbserv_tool(VCB process), nsrdsa_recover, nsrdsa_save(module binaries), nsrdmpix, nsrcatconfig, nsrbmr and nsravatar. These are incorporated in the NetWorker code and are a mixture of processes and binaries(like in cumulative patches) They are not commands perse. They have more meaning to Engineering rather then to the user as they are more internal to the code then commands that the user would use.
Hi, thanks for looking into it as well. I think it wouldn’t hurt EMC to spend 15 minutes to an hour though to come up with man pages for Unix systems that simply document what part of NetWorker uses a binary, and not to use it manually. It is reasonably common I find for system administrators to want to know (even briefly) what a command is, and the man pages are always the start.
Man, go looking for imformation on a command only to find a posting about how screwed I am if I want information on that command. So sad. I know it’s not a command perse, but it was command enough to land in page 55 of the install guide, convincing me to run it. Now I’m kind of wondering what happened. My bad, but they did advertise it in a guide.
Out of curiosity, what command was it that was mentioned? (There are so many different versions of NetWorker I have documentation for that it’s easier to ask then check p55 on each one…)