The top ten for 2011

It’s that time of the year where I sit back for a moment and look at what articles have attracted the most readers over the year, and it’s a fairly eclectic bunch. Interestingly, for the first time since forever, the article about fixing NSR Peer Information issues didn’t come first – we have some new winners.

10 – New Micromanual – LinuxVTL and NetWorker

The second micromanual was a step-by-step guide for configuring the open source LinuxVTL system with NetWorker. I had hoped when I started writing micromanuals that I’d get them more frequently delivered, but various factors get in the way of this. Maybe in 2012 I’ll be able to get a couple more out and available.

9 – Killing scheduled cloning operations

When NetWorker’s scheduled clone option was introduced, there were a few bugs relating to stopping a scheduled clone operation from the GUI. Sometimes you could, and sometimes you couldn’t. However, you could always kill a scheduled clone job from the command line, which is what this post explained.

8 – NetWorker Firewall Configuration on Windows

Very early in the year I was doing a lot of work with NetWorker on Windows 2008 R2, and I was noticing a few gaps in the installation process when it came to the process of automated configuration of the Windows Firewall to work with NetWorker daemons. This post explained the lessons I learnt.

7 – Carry a jukebox with you (if you’re using Linux)

This article was my first post about configuring the open source LinuxVTL system with NetWorker. Since then LinuxVTL has evolved quite a lot, and I’ll likely even need to update that micromanual early in the new year as a consequence.

6 – Why I’d choose NetWorker over NetBackup Every Time

Despite the fact that the article was titled “Why I’d choose…”, I had a rather indignant response to this post insisting I was being a jerk by writing it. I stand by every word in that post. I would not, personally, elect to choose NetBackup over NetWorker on the basis that NetBackup only has true image recovery as an option, and that NetBackup doesn’t support dependency chains for backup images. I see both of these factors as critical to a true enterprise backup product, and NetBackup only half supports one of them. That doesn’t make me a jerk, it makes me someone who gives a damn about your data.

5 – Using NetWorker Client with Opensolaris

A guest article written by Ronny Egner, this post covered off getting the NetWorker client working with the OpenSolaris version of Solaris.

4 – Basics – Fixing “NSR peer information” errors

A persistent challenge in NetWorker is when the NSR peer information gets out of whack; usually this can happen when a significant change happens on a client, and the server must have this information reset. I’d still love to see this article become irrelevant by seeing an option appear in NMC to handle it, but until then, this will remain a fairly popular article.

3 – This is wrong

Earlier this year, an Australian hosting service lost thousands of hosted domains and websites due to a “hack attack”. Supposedly the clever hackers destroyed not only the production data, but also all the backups.

What really went wrong was that the company in question had designed a very poor and inadequate backup solution. Rumours were abounding at the time that backups were just simply replicated snapshots. Snapshots may be able to act as backups, but not indefinitely, and not if they’re the only thing configured. (Backups and snapshots are effectively ‘sister’ activities in ILP.)

2 – micromanual: NetWorker Power User Guide to nsradmin

The original micromanual – “NetWorker power user guide to nsradmin” was and remains extremely popular. There’s been thousands of downloads of it since its release, including quite a number from EMC themselves, so it’s clearly a handy resource. If you’ve not downloaded it yourself but you want to boost your NetWorker productivity, it’s a must read.

1 – NetWorker 7.6 SP1

When NetWorker 7.6 SP1 came out, it was a huge release. In my opinion, it should have been numbered NetWorker 7.7 at least; it wasn’t a minor set of changes or a round of bug fixes, it included significant functionality updates (including one of my favourites – support for Boost). As the number one read article of the year, it’s been a big resource for people looking at the functionality of newer releases of NetWorker.

And that, they say, is that

This year has personally been a huge year for me. My partner and I moved state/city in June, going from a regional area just outside of Sydney to the inner west of Melbourne. We also celebrated our 15th anniversary together, surrounded by many of our new friends (who are like family to us) and a few of our old friends. We were even invited to get on the radio to talk about that, not only from the longevity of the relationship and having run the anniversary party up against the monthly Melbourne Den night. (There’s a podcast coming…) It was also the year when I sorted a lot of stuff out, and to boil all this down: it was the year that I spent a lot of time focusing on my personal life and not so much on the blog.

There may still be one or two posts left for 2011, but I’m also starting to get my head around changes and new material for 2012, and I believe 2012 will be a big year for NetWorker users.