For what it’s worth, I believe that the continuing lack of support for renaming clients as a function within NMC, (as opposed to the current, highly manual process), represents an annoying and non-trivial gap in functionality that causes administrators headaches and undue work.
For me, this was highlighted most recently when a customer of mine needed to shift their primary domain, and all clients had been created using the fully qualified domain name. All 500 clients. Not 5, not 50, but 500.
The current mechanisms for renaming clients may be “OK” if you only rename one client a year, but more and more often I’m seeing sites renaming up to 5 clients a year as a regular course of action. If most of my customers are doing it, surely they’re not unique.
Renaming clients in NetWorker is a pain. And I don’t mean a “oops I just trod on a pin” style pain, but a “oh no, I just impaled my foot on a 6 inch rusty nail” style pain. It typically involves:
- Taking care to note client ID
- Recording the client configuration for all instances of the client
- Deleting all instances of the client
- Rename the index directory
- Recreate all instances of the client, being sure on first instance creation to include the original client ID
(If the client is explicitly named in pool resources, they have to be updated as well, first clearing the client from those pools and then re-adding the newly “renamed” client.)
This is not fun stuff. Further, the chance for human error in the above list is substantial, and when we’re playing with indices, human error can result in situations where it becomes very problematic to either facilitate restores or ensure that backup dependencies have appropriate continuity.
Now, I know that facilitating a client rename from within a GUI isn’t easy, particularly since the NMC server may not be on the same host as the NetWorker server. There’s a bunch of (potential pool changes), client resource changes, filesystem changes and the need to put in appropriate rollback code so that if the system aborts half-way through it can revert at least to the old client name.
As I’ve argued in the past though, just because something isn’t easy doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.