I know this is a minor quibble – and for the most part, minor quibbles sum up the issues that I have with NetWorker. However, it annoys the hell out of me.
Somewhere, someone in the development team at EMC got the bright idea for NetWorker 7.3 that for “usability” and “consistency” reasons, it would become necessary when depositing media to either:
- Answer an inane question (i.e., sequence goes: put media in CAP, run nsrjb -d, get asked to answer ‘yes’ to whether you want to import media or not)
- Remember to add a -Y option to the nsrjb -d command to automatically answer ‘yes’ to the inane question.
Now, I do have a problem with this. In the first case, core behaviour was changed, and I don’t like that. Nor do I see a valid consistency reason – in nsrjb you’ve always been required to answer ‘yes’ or to add a -Y to the command if you’re going to do something destructive, but depositing media shouldn’t be deemed a destructive action.
In the second case, administrators are going to get into the habit of automatically throwing a -Y option onto each nsrjb command they run. I’m the first to admit that where I need to, I do use -Y, but don’t advocate that people get into the habit of using it except for when it is really necessary.
Thus, my preference would be that some release of NetWorker would drop the inane question when a deposit is done, and just let the administrator or person running the deposit get on with the activity of moving tapes.