Top 5 Reflections

 Basics, General thoughts, NetWorker  10 Responses »
Jul 172009
 

So this morning I was looking through the stats for this blog, and I generated the list of most popular posts thus far. I can’t say any of the results surprised me. Every single one of the top 5 comes from the “Basics” series.

Number 5, on that list, was Basics – Listing Files in a backup. There’s a lot of people out there who want to know how to use nsrinfo in general, and specifically want to know about pulling file lists for savesets. Net result? I think it would be greatly beneficial if in NMC users could double-click on browsable savesets and get a complete listing of files therein.

Number 4 was Basics – mminfo, savetime and greater than/less than. Now, I’m not going to pretend that every person who visited that article was looking for details about how greater than and less than works in mminfo in relation to savetimes, though I suspect a reasonable percentage of people new to mminfo found that interesting. My take on it is that it proves there’s not really enough documentation about mminfo, and that mminfo needs some expansion. My personal preference? Having a full SQL-like query engine for mminfo would greatly expand the options available to NetWorker administrators.

Number 3 on the list is Basics – Changing saveset browse/retention times. As regularly as possible I try to check the search strings that have brought people to my blog (as recorded by wordpress), and I can practically guarantee that every day there are multiple combinations to do with savesets, browse and retention times. Sometimes those combinations reference nsrmm, sometimes they don’t. Clearly, extending saveset browse/retention times in NetWorker needs to be more manageable from within the GUI as a bare minimum. I’ll get to the command line in a moment.

Moving on to number 2, we have something that I get search results for every day without fail. That’s Basics – Fixing “NSR Peer information” errors. It’s actually a reasonably simple error to fix, but sometimes finding the information about it is a bit like the old needle-in-a-haystack. I’m hoping that the posting on it has helped quite a few sites to clear out the warnings/errors in their logs and reduce the amount of clutter being reported.

Finally, for number 1, a topic I’m completely unsurprised to see at the top, we have Basics – Parallelism in NetWorker. Not because it’s difficult, but because there’s no absolute rules, parallelism is a topic in NetWorker that many administrators, regardless of length of time with the product, find challenging at times. Set too low, and backups may overrun. Set too high, and device contention, client slow-downs, recovery performance issues, etc., may come into play. Tuning parallelism in NetWorker has to take a lot into account.

The content of this list suggests a few things to me:

  • None of this information is out of reach in the product manuals, but, since the product manuals are (necessarily) lengthy, it is logistically is out of reach for a lot of users who don’t have time to read lengthy manuals.
  • EMC product management could take a few tips from the top 5 articles on my blog – I think they represent areas that could be improved within usability of the product. While parallelism is not something that can “solved” by changes within the GUI (it is, by necessity, complex), other options, such as improving mminfo search, making saveset contents more accessible within the GUI, etc., are readily fixable.
  • It seems there might be scope for a “Getting Started with NetWorker” style manual. I think a traditional book would (a) be too expensive and (b) be unsuitable. This is the sort of information that people want readily to hand on their desktops.

On the last point, I’m interested in writing such a manual. I obviously have some experience with writing – but more so than just the book, over the years I’ve written literally thousands of pages of NetWorker instructions as part of professional services documentation, training courses, etc.

So here’s a question – would people be interested in say, an eBook along the lines of “Getting Started with NetWorker” that gives basic operational and instruction usage so that rather than having to wade through the (close to 1000+) pages of the official documentation they had something shorter, and geared towards day to day operation?

Let me know what you think.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 08:22  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,

Basics – Fixing "NSR peer information" errors

 Basics, NetWorker, Scripting  26 Responses »
Feb 232009
 

If you’re using a modern NetWorker environment, the chances are that you’ll periodically notice entries such as the following in the daemon.log / daemon.raw files on the backup server:

39078 02/02/2009 09:45:13 PM  0 0 2 1152952640 5095 0 nox nsrexecd SYSTEM error: There is already a machine using the name: “faero”. Either choose a different name for your machine, or delete the “NSR peer information” entry for “faero” on host: “nox”

While this may look confronting, it’s actually a trivially easy error to fix that requires just a minute or so of your time with nsradmin. First, note the client that the error is about, and the client that the error is being recorded from. In this case, the error is about the client faero, while the error is being registered against the host nox.

To fix, run up nsradmin against the client service on nox:

# nsradmin -p nsrexec -s nox

(alternatively, you can use: nsradmin -p 390113 -s nox)

At the nsradmin> prompt, enter the command:

delete type: NSR peer information; name: faero

And answer yes when prompted to confirm. For example, the session might resemble the following:

nsradmin> delete type: NSR peer information; name: faero
                        type: NSR peer information;
               administrator: root, "user=root,host=nox";
                        name: faero;
               peer hostname: faero;
          Change certificate: ;
    certificate file to load: ;
Delete? y
deleted resource id 17.0.83.117.0.0.0.0.210.37.85.73.0.0.0.0.10.0.0.1(1)

There, you’ve done it. Note that you should be periodically scanning your daemon raw/log files for errors and trying to eliminate them. The goal should be that any error or warning reported in the file is something that you do need to worry about/investigate, rather than having a lot of “false positives” floating around in the system.

[Update, 2009-05-12]

I thought I’d mention that one of the most common times I see these warnings occur is after I’ve uninstalled/reinstalled NetWorker on a client, as opposed to having upgraded. Since on some clients it’s more or less necessary to uninstall/reinstall rather than upgrade, that helps to understand why the information is lost periodically. My surmise is that on a new install, the NetWorker client processes generate a new ‘certificate’ or ‘identity’. As this new information conflicts with existing information the backup server has on the client, that’s what triggers the error.

It could be that other factors can cause this, but it seems that this is at least a primary cause.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 17:52  Tagged with: , , ,
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