A blast from the past

I had to briefly run up NetWorker 6.x this week in order to confirm that cross platform directed recovery really did work back then, and that I wasn’t going nuts.

The short answer is yes, it did.

The longer answer is that it made me profoundly grateful that we’ve moved beyond 6.x:

Sure, the Unix GUI was at least serviceable – for watching backups, at least. But it sucked for creating any new resources. The basic form approach with endless scrolling, etc., was painful. The old Windows native GUI at least had some advantages there.

But it was all the other things about 6.x that you just take for granted now in 7.x that I noticed, such as:

• (On Linux at least) What? What happened to inquire and sjirdtag? Honestly, I’ve been using these so heavily that when they didn’t install as part of my 6.1.3 install I removed and re-added the packages just to make sure I wasn’t going crazy.
• ADV_FILE. OK, so I complain about the inadequacies of ADV_FILE a lot, but the 7.x series of NetWorker has been around for so long that I automatically tried to create an ADV_FILE device for my testing. Nope, had to create a file type device instead.
• Urgh – monolithic resource files (nsr.res, nsrjb.res, nsrla.res). Once again I’m grateful to have the split resource database system that came in with NetWorker 7.0.

On top of those points, and so many areas where there’s been enhancements to NetWorker over the years, there was one memory that particularly struck me with 6.x: dynamic drive sharing – introduced in the 6.x era, and way too oversold at a time when SANs were only just beginning to be designed to work properly with tape, DDS gave me more project overruns and nightmare support scenarios than anything else. While DDS hasn’t gone away in 7.x, it’s become easier with TapeAlert, better management generally, and better SANs.

Oh, but one thing we lost: cross platform recovery capabilities. Please EMC engineering, bring it back. At least for the folks that are migrating Novell NetWare to OES on SLES.