I’m pleased to say that the first micromanual for the NetWorker Information Hub is now available for download.
The micromanual homepage has been updated to provide download details. If you have a good working knowledge of NetWorker, and are to learn about how nsradmin works, and so how to get more experience with automation and scripting, you should find something of value in the micromanual. The intended audience for the NetWorker Power User Guide to nsradmin is to provide NetWorker administrators who have a firm grasp of NetWorker, but mostly at the GUI level, with a solid starting point for learning nsradmin. It starts with a basic overview, then introduces concepts surrounding scripting, bulk updates, etc.
There is a registration process for the micromanual, but this has nothing to do with providing your name or email address to any third party. Instead, it’s about having a means of touching base with people who have downloaded it to let them know if any updates are made. (And that’s the only reason, nothing else.)
This micromanual contains examples for both Windows and Unix/Linux systems, so hopefully there’s something in there for every NetWorker Power User.
Happy reading!
Thanks! Just what I needed 🙂
Thanks for your help with it.
Regards,
rk
Nice Manual!! I have been using nsradmin for years, the thing I was wondering, can you change your Administrator passwd with the nsradmin??
Thanks for the feedback on the manual, Evan.
By Administrator password, do you mean the NMC password? If so, no, this is maintained outside of the NetWorker resource files.
However, any password maintained within the resources (e.g., user account passwords when the NetWorker software isn’t running as the default user), datazone passphrases, etc., can be updated using nsradmin as well.
Hi Preston.
I’ve been using nsradmin for more than a year now. Now I have gone through your micromanual two times and the second time, it really opened up a new understanding on how it works. Somehow nsradmin seems simple now and I’m seeing much more use of nsradmin.
Also the script examples are good – It’s valuable to see how you control nsradmin with Perl.
I can’t wait to see your next manual on NetWorker CLI.
Sincerely,
Johannes
Hi Johannes,
Thanks for the feedback – I hope you find the micromanuals that I’m currently working on just as useful!
Cheers
Preston.
Hi Preston.
Are you still planning on publishing more micromanuals? I’m very excited about the mminfo manual as I’m sure many others are too. I also want to encourage you to ask for some payment for your work. 10-20$ for the nsradmin manual would have been very fair.
Sincerely,
Johannes
Hi Johannes,
Thanks for your kind feedback on the nsradmin micromanual. I’ve somewhat slipped in my planned schedule for the micromanuals – I’m afraid work and other commitments have taken priority. I’m still hoping to get something out in a month or so, but I may focus first on the LinuxVTL micromanual I’d mentioned previously.
Cheers,
Preston.
Thanks for this micromanual, it’s very interesting and helpful!!
Thanks for the manual, I’m looking forward to more. In the nsradmin samples for schedules you use “skip last friday every month” as an override value. While the syntax is correct and nsradmin accepts this as an override the use of “last” is not supported and it may not work for all months. The 7.6 admin guide states ‘The use of “last” for number is not supported (for example, “last friday” cannot be used to refer to the last Friday of the month).’
I am not sure why this is the case but prior to that being in the admin guide I actually opened a ticket with Legato on the issue. I had used it for last saturday and when I checked each month found that it did not always work.
As close as I’ve been able to tell, “last” is most likely to fail in situations where the last X of the month falls on or within 1-2 days of a daylight savings transition – and depends on your actual timezone – e.g., GMT+12/13 seems to have more problems than say, GMT+10/11. It has got progressively more stable across newer versions of NetWorker.
Do we have tool which can capture the configuration, and creates a good pictorial or .xls file to be used for some design workbook? (including groups Clients, Groups,Schedules,Policy,media, storage node, etc.,)
Check out IDATA Tools – http://nsrd.info/blog/2009/09/14/idata-tools-v4-1-out-now/ and http://nsrd.info/blog/2009/02/05/turbocharged-administration-with-idata-tools/ for details.
Hi Preston,
So far (7 years) I’ve hardly ever used nsradmin, mostly the GUI. After reading this excellent manual I agree with Johannes “Somehow nsradmin seems simple now and I’m seeing much more use of nsradmin.”.
Thanks.
Hi Erik,
Thanks so much for the feedback!
Cheers,
Preston.
I really like the examples in the guide, however there is one scenario I’d like to see covered, that is exporting a configuration (part or whole) to text file, modifying it and importing it again into a fresh server with no existing configuration.
Thanks for the feedback!
That content though is beyond the scope of an introductory manual. I would suggest that such an action can only be partially scripted and would require expert interaction.
Matt, I have done this and have some examples written with unix scripts. I gave up on Windows because of the limitations of batch files, however if you know perl you might have more luck. I would be happy to share these with you.
Hi Preston.
I was going through your guide to nsradmin again to get information about appending to clients.
E.g. if I append to all client resources group attribute to belong to a group called index, I can use this, as I figured out by reading your manual:
. type: nsr client
show name
append group: index
But: what if I want to take the change back? That is, make the group attribute of all clients, be as it was before I did the append?
Best regards,
Johannes
Hi Johannes,
Unfortunately there’s no easy way to “back out” the changes. At best I’d suggest first getting an output of what it looked like per client, (e.g., show name:; group: … print type: NSR client), then be prepared to feed this into a loop for setting and updating the client group afterwards.
Cheers,
Preston.
Hi Preston de Guise
The nsradmin micro manual is awesome…keep it up!..cant wait for mminfo!