It’s recently occurred to me that NetWorker (7.6) has been a heck of a lot more reliable since going to 10.6.3 / 10.6.3.1. As always, it’s a bit of a grey zone, since it’s not officially supported (and there’s definitely some patching required) – hence the wait for 7.6 SP1, but overall I’m now noticing that the client process remains contactable by the server across multiple sleep/wake and/or location transitions, something that it wouldn’t do before. There’s still some other behavioural oddities, but overall, I realised that I’ve not reinstalled the client on my laptop now for over 2 weeks, which is a bit of a record since I installed Snow Leopard. If you’re in a situation where you absolutely have to be running 10.6 and backing up with NetWorker, and knowing it’s not currently supported, I’d suggest you make sure you’re on 10.6.3.1.

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The net result is that you’ll get into situations where several errors will start to happen and you’ll need to eventually reinstall the NetWorker client, reboot, and then potentially reinstall the NetWorker client another time. Note that complete cold restarts do not seem to as reliably fix (or temporarily offer a workaround to the) issues as does the reinstall/reboot/reinstall method.

Error 1

Attempts to connect from the server to the client will fail – e.g.,

[root@nox ~]# nsradmin -p 390113 -s archon
39078:nsradmin: RPC error: Remote system error
There does not appear to be a NetWorker nsrexecd server running on archon.

Error 2

Stopping and restarting the NetWorker services on the client fails:

root@archon ~
$ SystemStarter stop NetWorker
Stopping NetWorker Client.

root@archon ~
$ ps -eaf | grep nsr

0  5381  5230   0   0:00.00 ttys001    0:00.00 grep nsr

root@archon ~
$ SystemStarter start NetWorker

Starting NetWorker Client.
/Library/StartupItems/NetWorker/NetWorker: line 10:  5389 Illegal instruction     /usr/sbin/nsrexecd

Error 3

I’m finding that directives are getting confused over directories and paths too:

* archon:/ 70340:savepnpc: ignoring directory specification for `/Users/preston/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo/' in
* archon:/ `/Users/preston/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo/.nsr' - not contained within directory `/users/preston/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo/'
* archon:/ 70340:savepnpc: ignoring directory specification for `/Users/preston/Library/Parallels/' in
* archon:/ `/Users/preston/Library/Parallels/.nsr' - not contained within directory `/users/preston/Library/Parallels/'

It seems to be a spurious error – usually when this happens the directives are still processed.

Error 4

On some backups – usually full, I get hundreds of malloc errors in the savegroup completion – e.g.,

* archon:/ savepnpc(668,0xa0a01500) malloc: *** error for object 0x20: pointer being freed was not allocated
* archon:/ *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
* archon:/ savepnpc(668,0xa0a01500) malloc: *** error for object 0x20: pointer being freed was not allocated
* archon:/ *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug

What I’m doing

I’ve currently got a question case open with EMC asking when we’ll get official support for Snow Leopard. I’ll update this blog with details when I can.

[Update] There are existing escalations to get Snow Leopard support. The current tentative schedule, I’m told, is for support in NetWorker 7.6 SP1. There’s apparently escalations against 7.5.x as well – personally, if I were a betting person, I’d be betting we’ll more likely get support in just 7.6 via SP1 rather than both 7.6 and the 7.5 tree.

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Previously when Snow Leopard came out, I posted that NetWorker 7.5 was able to work with it, but did qualify that if you were backing up laptops or other hosts that periodically changed location, NetWorker would get itself into a sufficient knot that it would become necessary to reinstall and/or reboot in order to get a successful backup. (In actual fact, it was rare that a reboot would be sufficient.) Fixed-point machines – e.g., servers and desktops – typically did not experience this problem.

It would seem that 7.6 handles location changes considerably better.

If you’re experiencing intermittent problems with NetWorker 7.5 not wanting to work properly on Mac OS X 10.6 hosts, I’d suggest upgrading to NetWorker 7.6 as a test to see whether that resolves your problems.

The usual qualifiers remain – read the release notes before doing an upgrade.

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For laptop users though, it’s turning out to be slightly different story. My ongoing experience now is that if I switch locations repeatedly (e.g., home to work, work to customer site, customer site to work), the NetWorker client daemons eventually get so bogged down that it’s necessary to reboot to get back to working backups. In fact, a couple of times I’ve needed to go so far as to reinstall NetWorker on my laptop in order to get it running again smoothly. (That’s using NetWorker 7.5.1.)

If you’ve got mobile users upgraded to Snow Leopard who are now experiencing backup problems, a reboot (unfortunately) may be your first point of call – the nature of the daemon hang-up seems to prevent proper process shutdown, which in turn prevents the daemons from properly restarting. If the reboot fails, a client reinstall should fix it.

From my experience so far, it seems to only happen when locations are changed multiple times.

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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.

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