If you’ve got multiple jukeboxes within a NetWorker environment, but primarily work with one of them, you may find ‘nsrjb’ to be a bit of a pain any time you forget to specify the jukebox name. If you’re not familiar with this, here’s how nsrjb reacts in this situation:
[root@tara ~]# nsrjb 1: VTL1 [enabled] 2: VTL2 [enabled] No jukebox selected. Please select a jukebox to use:? [1] _
(Slight aside: never assume the numbered list is the same; NetWorker doesn’t guarantee the order being the same between executions – in fact, I actually only put in an RFE about this a couple of days ago, as I’m hoping it could at least be alphabetically ordered at all times…)
If you want to avoid the jukebox-prompt from nsrjb, one of the easiest ways is to specify the jukebox name as part of the command – e.g.,
[root@tara ~]# nsrjb -j VTL1
That’s fine of course, but if the vast majority of the time you perform operations on a single jukebox, you can specify a default jukebox as an environment variable (NSR_JUKEBOX) and streamline your processes. For example, on Linux, using the bash, this might look as follows:
[root@tara ~]# export NSR_JUKEBOX=VTL1 [root@tara ~]# nsrjb
Jukebox VTL1: (Ready to accept commands) slot volume pool barcode volume id recyclable 1: 800840L4 ClientTesting 800840L4 3814088325 no 2: 800841L4 ClientTesting 800841L4 3797311146 no 3: 800842L4 ClientTesting 800842L4 3847642669 no 4: 800843L4 ClientTesting 800843L4 3780533937 no 5: 800844L4 ClientTesting 800844L4 3763756765 yes 6: 800845L4 ClientTesting 800845L4 3864419885 yes <snip>
Being an environment variable, this is something you can choose to set locally – say, on a per storage-node basis, when you have multiple storage nodes. It’s relatively common for instance to have a tape library on one or more storage nodes, so for the appropriate logins (or even at a system level) on each storage node it would be possible to set the local jukebox as the default, thereby streamlining usage of the units.
As an example, here’s a lab storage node with the setting in use:
[root@fawn ~]# export NSR_JUKEBOX="rd=fawn:VTL3" [root@fawn ~]# nsrjb -s tara
Jukebox rd=fawn:VTL3: (Ready to accept commands) <snip>
For something that can take you less than 30 seconds to set, the environment variable NSR_JUKEBOX can certainly be a big time saver if you have multiple jukeboxes in your environment and (like me) you’re a command line junkie.