Killing scheduled cloning operations

In a previous blog post, I discussed how much I liked the scheduled cloning operations introduced in NetWorker 7.6 SP1. Since then, I’ve had several people comment on it saying that while they’re able to manually start scheduled cloning operations, they’re not able to stop scheduled cloning operations in NMC – regardless of whether they were manually or automatically started.

Now I thought I’d been able to manually stop a scheduled cloning operation via NMC during beta testing, but I may have confused myself with something else, and when I noticed the same issue, it led me to think – can I stop this some other way, maybe from the command line? (For what it’s worth, the inability to stop a scheduled clone from NMC is a known issue, and there’s an EMC request running for it.)

It turns out without NMC, the command line is how you stop a scheduled cloning operation. It actually turned out to be fairly simple in the end. To do so, you use jobquery and jobkill.

First, use jobquery to identify the scheduled clone job you want:

# jobquery
jobquery> show name:; job id:; job state:
jobquery> print type: clone job; job state: SESSION ACTIVE:
                      job id: 64002;
                   job state: SESSION ACTIVE;
                        name: clone.linux clones;

Once you’ve got that job ID, all you have to do is quit jobquery, and run:

# jobkill -j jobID

In this case – it would be:

# jobkill -j 64002
Terminating job 64002

That’s it – that’s how you stop a scheduled clone job.

6 thoughts on “Killing scheduled cloning operations”

    1. As I said to someone who tweeted the same question – if you’ve got multiple clone policy jobs running and you’re wanting to kill just one of them, kill -9 only helps if you want to take a cricket bat to all of them, or want to play pot luck.

  1. In NMC in the monitor screen, on the sessions lists. Click on the tab for clones. Right click on the session you want to stop and you should see an option to stop it. Of course this only works once the clone job has progressed enough to show up in the session window.

    Or am I barking up the wrong tree? FYI – Running cumulative fix 3 here which may make a difference.

    1. You’re in the right place. However, it would seem that under certain circumstances, or in certain deployments, the “Stop” option is permanently disabled, regardless of the progress of the cloning. This runs through to and including 7.6.1.3. I’m yet to to test 7.6.1.4, but no mention of it being fixed was in the release notes.

  2. Got into hassle with stopping scheduled cloning job, and it worked this way (in my case at least – NW 7.6.2 on Windows):
    – go into configuration tab for Cloning jobs
    – copy job you want to stop into new name
    – delete original job
    – copy copied job definition into original job name
    Hope it helps!

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