There’s a few different ways you can get in touch:

(In terms of both LinkedIn, I’d strongly suggest that if you want to connect there, you need to explain why you’re connecting; I don’t accept unsolicited connection requests from people I don’t know who provide no explanation of who they are.)

Note that I blog in my spare time, and so I may not always respond to emails quickly. If you have a support related question, you should always use the appropriate vendor support forums.

26 thoughts on “Contact”

  1. Hi mate,
    How are you? I’m Ahad from Australia and I’m kind of new to using Networker 7.6. Even worse, I’m at beginner level with command line (UNIX) and kind of struggling to get things together. So I thought I’ll try my luck on the net and here I am.

    We are using:

    Solaris master: OS ver 10
    SUN SL500 library
    And we use Control-m as backup scheduler along with rman.

    Now:

    Sometimes we kill backup jobs from the GUI of Networker, but the jobs don’t get kill straight away.Instead, it hangs. What I would like to know are:

    1. How to kill a specific savegroup in UNIX without killing the Networker Services.(Now we use (nsr_shutdown), but it kills all savegroups that are running. (A command line example would be great)
    2. If I can use Nsradmin to do it, what would be the format (An exact example would be life saver).

    Thanks in advance mate.
    3. what’s the best way to perform a clean savegroup abort.

    1. It used to be that you could kill the running savegrp command on the NetWorker server; depending on how your control-M processes are kicking off the group, this could be the “simple” option. Invoking nsr_shutdown to stop a single group is not recommended.

      To stop a group under nsradmin, you’d use:

      nsradmin> print type: NSR group; name: groupName
      nsradmin> update stop now: True

      Cheers.

  2. Hi Preston,

    Sorry to push in a question, but I guess you might be able to help me out. I’m want to know how “All” works as save set in NetWorker… I’ve been looking around for an answer, but couldn’t find any. I want to know if there is a way to find all the save sets that ‘All’ would create for a client (WIN / UNIX) once savegrp starts and if there is a way to fetch that information for a backup client from backup server without running a save command ?

    **Let me know if this is wrong place to post this query**

    Regards
    Marcos

    1. Hi Marcos,

      Sorry for the slow reply – I’d been travelling.

      ‘All’ will for the most part be all automatically mounted SAN or local filesystems. I.e., filesystems perceived to be direct-attach to the client as opposed to network shares. (There is a chance from memory that Linux will treat CIFS mountpoints as local – I tried to have this removed, but it was re-added and I’m not sure whether it still is/isn’t the standard process.)

      A save is your best option of finding out what is in the ‘All’ saveset for a client but you can do a save probe:

      savegrp -pv -c clientName groupName

      (putting groupName in quotes if you have spaces in it).

      The verbose-probe will connect out to the client and get it to enumerate its savesets (assuming the client has a saveset of ‘All’ specified).

      Cheers,
      Preston.

      1. Thanks Preston,

        But I wouldn’t want to use ‘savegrp -p’, is there a way we can fetch the details without running a group. Well, what I was looking for, is a method to find what file systems will form part of ‘All’ in a backup of a host. I can try using ‘mminfo’, but that is post backup has completed, but I wanted to find the file systems before the backup starts.

        Regards
        Marcos

  3. Hi Preston,

    I wanted to know is there a command to check the long running backups, like if any group or client whoes backup is running more than 24hrs?

    Thanks & Regards,

    Vishal S

    1. Hi Vishal,

      There’s not really any direct command to work that out.

      There’s some NMC reports to do with groups that should cover group start/finish time, but they’d likely only apply to groups that had actually finished.

      From the command line, your best bet would be to use nsradmin to look for any groups that weren’t in an ‘idle’ state, and then compare their start time against the current date/time, but you’ll need to do some date/time conversions for that. Perl would be able to handle it without too much fuss, as should other scripting languages.

      Cheers,
      Preston.

    2. Hello,

      Networker Reporter Utility V6.0 introduced saveset monitor that trigger alert when backup takes longer duration than configured.
      Configurable at client and saveset level, you can define, in minutes, max duration you authorize.
      Look at http://users.skynet.be/networker_reporter for more info how to grab your free reporting kit !
      Cheers
      Thierry

  4. Preston–

    Could you perhaps go into more detail about the VMware Backup Appliance? I’m testing out NW8.1 on our new backup server, and while I am really liking what I see so far (particularly expanded notices and the new AFTD setup), it seems VADP is now being deprecated, less than a year after I figured it out. It seems like I’m going to have to deploy a lot more storage for this VBA (the 4TB version simply because I have more than 10 VMs) just to act as a backup proxy, where the VADP VM was a fairly small Windows VM that just directed the VMware image snapshot over the network with very little local storage needed. We’re a fairly small shop with a 12TB SAN that is dedicated to VMware, so deploying 4TB seems excessive.

    Thanks,
    Eric

    1. Hi Eric,

      Thanks for the suggestion – I am planning an article or two on virtual backups, including VBA – hopefully something should be published before the end of February.

      Cheers,
      Preston.

  5. Hi Mr.Preston,

    Just to congratulate you about so wise advices on NetWorker articles you wrote. And thanks for sharing your valuable knowledge.

    Regards

  6. Hi Preston,

    I am a novice NetWorker (using version 8.1) and found your website very useful.

    I have a query to ask you and the scenario is as follows:

    When we launch the ‘Networker Administration’ Window, go to Device > Libraries > [Library Name] , we can see some drives (usually two of them, /dev/nst0 and /dev/nst1). In idle condition, the message displayed for them would be ‘ejected’. When some drive fails to work, it doesn’t display any message. In that case, when we try to mount a tape on that particular drive, it would display an error message related to “Jukebox”.

    In that case, what are we supposed to do?
    I have tried rebooting tape library, rescanning scsi buses, and then restarting networker service, but it did not work.

    1. Sorry, I didn’t notice this message. There’s two potential scenarios I can think of:

      * The jukebox has a physical fault, or,
      * The SCSI target for the robot head has changed.

      If you haven’t already done so (and it wasn’t a hardware error), you might want to try removing the jukebox from NetWorker and re-adding it, but be sure to turn on persistent device naming – that’ll help overcome that issue in future.

      1. Hi Preston.
        Thanks for responding back.

        Another question I am having about Tape library. If we wish to delete the tape library and reconfigure it again, then how that can be done?

        I am eagerly waiting for your articles on ‘jbconfig’ and ‘nsradmin’ as they are a few of the important commands related to NetWorker.

        1. Hi Mandar,

          Deleting and recreating the tape library is straight forward – ensure all devices are unmounted, delete the library, delete the devices, then re-run the configuration process.

          Cheers.

  7. Hi, Preston!

    Thanks a lot for being a trustworthy resource for all of us, Networker Admins.
    am sorry I push a question here, but this one has been a thorn in my side for quite some time: we have 1 x 8.0.3.6b367 Networker server running in a Virtualized environment.

    The server specs are:

    SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3 (x86_64) – Kernel
    Linux emcnw03 3.0.101-0.29-default #1 SMP Tue May 13 08:40:57 UTC 2014 (9ec28a0) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

    # lscpu
    Architecture: x86_64
    CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
    Byte Order: Little Endian
    CPU(s): 4
    On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3
    Thread(s) per core: 1
    Core(s) per socket: 2
    Socket(s): 2
    NUMA node(s): 1
    Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
    CPU family: 6
    Model: 62
    Stepping: 4
    CPU MHz: 2693.509
    BogoMIPS: 5387.01
    Hypervisor vendor: VMware
    Virtualization type: full
    L1d cache: 32K
    L1i cache: 32K
    L2 cache: 256K
    L3 cache: 30720K
    NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-3

    # free -m
    total used free shared buffers cached
    Mem: 32113 31736 376 0 883 28547
    -/+ buffers/cache: 2305 29807
    Swap: 5111 0 5111

    # df -h
    Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/sda2 89G 5.9G 79G 7% /
    udev 16G 176K 16G 1% /dev
    tmpfs 16G 0 16G 0% /dev/shm
    /dev/sda1 5.0G 168M 4.6G 4% /boot
    /dev/sda3 296G 158G 123G 57% /nsr

    It has 785 clients and 209 groups.

    Server had been running smoothly for several months, but from a week now, it simply freezes over because of lack of resources and stops responding to requests or processing backup jobs.

    As per the hypervisor server itself, stats show that it is nowhere near a stress point.

    Any hint on why our server could be choking to death?

    Cordially,
    Armando Leon

    1. Hi Armando,

      By ‘lack of resources’ do you mean it’s hitting a high CPU load, or something else?

      If the hypervisor is showing the server is not at a stress point, there’s two immediate scenarios I’d consider – running the various core maintenance jobs one at a time to see whether any of those are triggering the situation (and then referring it to support), or checking to see if there’s any ports exhaustion happening.

      For the ports exhaustion, I’d be looking in /nsr/logs/daemon.{log,raw} to see whether you’re getting errors about daemons being unreachable or unable to be connected to – that’s often a good sign.

      For the maintenance checks, if you grab one of the guides for upgrading NetWorker (say, the v8.2 upgrade guide), it will list a bunch of checks to do before the upgrade including nsrim -X, nsrck -m, nsrck -L3, etc. Run through those (in the order specified) and see whether any of them cause the server to encounter issues.

      A final note – also check the /nsr/cores directory to see whether there’s any core dumps being routinely generated: if there are, that’s your likely culprit right there.

      Cheers,
      Preston.

  8. Hi I want to create a monitor in SCOM giving notice if a clone job in Networker lasts for more than 8 hours.
    Possibly command jobquery can be used but I need proper parameters. can you help me?

    1. I’m not aware of an immediate option on jobquery to return that information. Because clone jobs can be executed from either the group or a clone policy having a single point where you can retrieve this information may not yet be possible.

  10. Hi Preston,

    In regards to NW v9, I was wondering if you can help me with a query.

    How do we create a Policy with Workflow such that backup of each client, is followed it’s index backup, like what used to happen by default in earlier NW versions

    Regards
    Marcos

    1. Hi Marcos,

      It’s my understanding this has been moved to the server protection policy rather than happening at the end of each backup as previously in order to allow the server to scale to a much higher value. I’ll need to do some testing to see whether this can be forced back into individual policies.

      Cheers,
      Preston.

  11. Hello,
    My company is going to be implementing a VNX5200 Device and Networker. This is all new to me. Can you recommend any resources or free training I can find online.
    Much appreciated,

    1. Hi Dusty,

      I always believe data protection is important enough that it warrants formal training. I’d suggest having a look at EMC’s offerings at education.emc.com for NetWorker related training, or refer to a nearby partner to see if they have compatible training.

      Cheers,
      Preston.

  12. hi Preston ,

    currently I am handling a migration project (netbackup to Networker ) where in I have to migrate clients to Networker 8.2 BU server . do you have any inputs if I can do this with good pace instead of creating one by one client config to networker .

    thanks !
    vinay Shinde

    1. Hi Vinay,

      Suggest you download the Turbocharged NetWorker Micromanual. Review the section and examples around nsradmin. If you have the NetWorker client installed on the hosts, there’s nothing stopping you using nsradmin with an input file to create the clients.

      Cheers.

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