Mac OS X Snow Leopard and NetWorker, redux

While initially I had some success with Snow Leopard and Mac OS X, I’m increasingly finding that it’s just boiling down to being too random for reliable backups. So far problems mainly seem to occur after a machine has gone to sleep and woken up multiple times – or had its network location changed multiple times. Thus it mainly seems (for the moment) to affect laptops or machines that frequently sleep.

The net result is that you’ll get into situations where several errors will start to happen and you’ll need to eventually reinstall the NetWorker client, reboot, and then potentially reinstall the NetWorker client another time. Note that complete cold restarts do not seem to as reliably fix (or temporarily offer a workaround to the) issues as does the reinstall/reboot/reinstall method.

Error 1

Attempts to connect from the server to the client will fail – e.g.,

[root@nox ~]# nsradmin -p 390113 -s archon
39078:nsradmin: RPC error: Remote system error
There does not appear to be a NetWorker nsrexecd server running on archon.

Error 2

Stopping and restarting the NetWorker services on the client fails:

root@archon ~
$ SystemStarter stop NetWorker
Stopping NetWorker Client.

root@archon ~
$ ps -eaf | grep nsr

0  5381  5230   0   0:00.00 ttys001    0:00.00 grep nsr

root@archon ~
$ SystemStarter start NetWorker

Starting NetWorker Client.
/Library/StartupItems/NetWorker/NetWorker: line 10:  5389 Illegal instruction     /usr/sbin/nsrexecd

Error 3

I’m finding that directives are getting confused over directories and paths too:

* archon:/ 70340:savepnpc: ignoring directory specification for `/Users/preston/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo/' in
* archon:/ `/Users/preston/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo/.nsr' - not contained within directory `/users/preston/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo/'
* archon:/ 70340:savepnpc: ignoring directory specification for `/Users/preston/Library/Parallels/' in
* archon:/ `/Users/preston/Library/Parallels/.nsr' - not contained within directory `/users/preston/Library/Parallels/'

It seems to be a spurious error – usually when this happens the directives are still processed.

Error 4

On some backups – usually full, I get hundreds of malloc errors in the savegroup completion – e.g.,

* archon:/ savepnpc(668,0xa0a01500) malloc: *** error for object 0x20: pointer being freed was not allocated
* archon:/ *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
* archon:/ savepnpc(668,0xa0a01500) malloc: *** error for object 0x20: pointer being freed was not allocated
* archon:/ *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug

What I’m doing

I’ve currently got a question case open with EMC asking when we’ll get official support for Snow Leopard. I’ll update this blog with details when I can.

[Update] There are existing escalations to get Snow Leopard support. The current tentative schedule, I’m told, is for support in NetWorker 7.6 SP1. There’s apparently escalations against 7.5.x as well – personally, if I were a betting person, I’d be betting we’ll more likely get support in just 7.6 via SP1 rather than both 7.6 and the 7.5 tree.