There should be more software installed on your NetWorker server than just the operating system and NetWorker. In order to get the most out of it, you should have a toolkit of utilities and applications that are there, at your beck and call, to help you get the most out of your backup system.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re on Windows, Linux or Unix. Like Batman’s utility belt, having some tools will help you go beyond a standard NetWorker install.
What I’ll do is outline what my NetWorker utility belt would look like, and then let others comment on what they’d declare as the essentials for themselves. Here’s what I advocate as “must haves” when installing NetWorker:
- An advanced scripting language – in my case, Perl.
- SMTP mail (outgoing) from the backup server.
- SSH (outgoing) from the backup server. (On Windows, this implies use of a bare cygwin install, etc.)
- IDATA Tools – I kid you not, I’m saying it just “for sales”, I’ve been working on these tools for years and they’re such second nature for certain operations that unless I’m running up a lab server for only a single test, it even gets installed on all my test systems too.
- The “tail” command; whether it’s installed by default on Unix, or added as a single command on Windows or added as part of a cygwin install on Windows, I can’t go without tail.
- A web browser – I know that sounds like a given, but on headless enterprise Unix systems, that means ensuring that at least elinks is installed on the NetWorker server itself.
- A tool for viewing potentially large log files. My tool of choice is usually vi, but I’m a grouchy old Unix user.
So, they’re my “absolutes” – or to be more correct, they’re the tools I’ll either (a) want to automatically install or (b) automatically miss if they’re not installed when I step up to a NetWorker server.
Does this somehow detract from NetWorker? Of course not. Most of those, as you’ll see, are about useful situations around the backup product rather than direct modification of it. I.e., they’re about system process tools. Those that are to do about scripting should be welcomed – I’d take any backup framework product over any monolithic backup product any day!
So, what’s in your utility belt? Or what do you wish was in your utility belt for NetWorker?
