There was recently a discussion on the NetWorker mailing list regarding a situation whereby a company was skipping certain media files (e.g., *.mp3) from a fileserver, but still wanted to know when those files were present. In this case, the backup administrator didn’t have administrative rights to the fileserver, so doing a straight search of the fileserver wasn’t really an option.<\/p>\n
One proposed solution was to change the “skip” to “null”, which does cause some<\/em> index information to be stored that can be searched with nsrinfo. How useful that “some” is though is of debate. The reason for this is that if you “null” a file in a backup, it will only be reported via an nsrinfo -v<\/em> command, and it won’t be reported with the full path to the file, meaning it’s necessary to walk the nsrinfo -v<\/em> output to scan each new change of path then construct the null’d file paths from there.<\/p>\n As an exercise for the list, I tried this out – here’s what I reported at the time:<\/p>\n Creating the test area we want to test with using the following commands –<\/p>\n Following this, configure a \/testing\/.nsr directive with the following content:<\/p>\n Now a backup can be run of the “\/testing” directory; because of the directive, “test.dat” will be excluded.<\/p>\n Finding test.dat<\/em> in nsrinfo output however is a little more tricky:<\/p>\n There’s no test.dat listed there. Resorting to ‘-v’ on nsrinfo, we do get the information, but as you can see, it’s more challenging to isolate the full path to the file:<\/p>\n So while this solution works, I’m not convinced it’s ideal in all instances.<\/p>\n The other solution I came up with I think works a little better, more reliably, and has the advantage of doing a live search on the filesystem even if the backup administrator doesn’t have administrator privileges<\/em>.<\/p>\n So, the other solution is to make use of the RUSER\/RCMD functionality in NetWorker to “have a chat” to the client daemons and get them to do something useful. Note that this is reasonably secure – you can only ask to run commands starting with “nsr” or “save”, and those commands must<\/em> reside in the same directory as the save<\/em> binary. In this case, we want to invoke save<\/em>. All you have to do is turn off whatever directives are in place for the client, then setup a no-save command execution for the client.<\/p>\n In the example below, we’re going to get the client “asgard” to do a no-save backup of its \/root folder, reporting back to the server “nox” but without actually transferring any data:<\/p>\n This style of command will work equally for Windows and Unix systems – indeed, I’ve done similar things on both Windows and Unix.<\/p>\n Obviously, once you’re done gathering the file list, it’s important to then re-enable any directives turned off for the test\/file walk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There was recently a discussion on the NetWorker mailing list regarding a situation whereby a company was skipping certain media…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,20],"tags":[659,784,848,852,872],"class_list":["post-1106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-networker","category-scripting","tag-nsrexec","tag-rcmd","tag-ruser","tag-save","tag-search"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t# mkdir \/testing\n# cp bigfile \/testing\n# cd \/testing\n# dd if=\/dev\/zero bs=1024k count=1024 of=test.dat<\/pre>\n
<< . >>\nnull: test.dat<\/pre>\n
[root@nox testing]# nsrinfo -t `mminfo -q \"name=\/testing\" -r nsavetime` nox\nscanning client `nox' for savetime 1254265148(Wed 30 Sep 2009 08:59:08 AM EST)\nfrom the backup namespace\n\/testing\/.nsr\n\/testing\/bigfile\n\/testing\/\n\/\n4 objects found<\/pre>\n
[root@nox testing]# nsrinfo -t `mminfo -q \"name=\/testing\" -r nsavetime` -v nox\nscanning client `nox' for savetime 1254265148(Wed 30 Sep 2009 08:59:08 AM EST) from the\nbackup namespace\nUNIX ASDF v2 file `\/testing\/.nsr', NSR size=188, fid = 2304.586641, file size=23\nUNIX ASDF v2 file `\/testing\/bigfile', NSR size=196195024, fid = 2304.97665, file\n\u00a0size=196176812\nUNIX ASDF v2 file `\/testing\/', NSR size=244, fid = 2304.97664, file size=4096\n ndirentry->586641\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0.nsr\n ndirentry->97669\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0test.dat <----- Here it is ------>\n ndirentry->2\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0..\n ndirentry->97665\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0bigfile\nUNIX ASDF v2 file `\/', NSR size=772, fid = 2304.2, file size=4096\n ndirentry->3677476\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0.vmware\/\n ndirentry->846145\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0mnt\/\n ndirentry->97633\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0.autorelabel\n ndirentry->11\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0lost+found\/\n ndirentry->2343169\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0lib64\/\n ndirentry->2701153\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0media\/\n ndirentry->1985185\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0opt\/\n ndirentry->2668609\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0etc\/\n ndirentry->1431937\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0sbin\/\n ndirentry->4133089\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0srv\/\n ndirentry->618337\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0boot\/\n ndirentry->97638\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0.bash_history\n ndirentry->1366849\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0bin\/\n ndirentry->2766241\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0selinux\/\n ndirentry->3417121\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0tmp\/\n ndirentry->97644\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0.autofsck\n ndirentry->585793\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0root\/\n ndirentry->1692289\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0lib\/\n ndirentry->97647\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0nsr\n ndirentry->0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0sys\/\n ndirentry->97648\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0home\n ndirentry->1887553\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0usr\/\n ndirentry->2147905\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0var\/\n ndirentry->2245537\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0d\/\n ndirentry->0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0dev\/\n ndirentry->0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0net\/\n ndirentry->0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0misc\/\n ndirentry->0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0proc\/\n ndirentry->2\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0..\n ndirentry->97664\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0testing\/\n4 objects found<\/pre>\n
[root@nox testing]# RCMD=\"save -s nox -n \/root\"\n[root@nox testing]# RUSER=root\n[root@nox testing]# export RCMD RUSER\n[root@nox testing]# nsrexec -c asgard\nWarning: Could not determine job id: Connection timed out. Continuing ...\n\/root\/.elinks\/globhist\n\/root\/.elinks\/cookies\n\/root\/.elinks\/gotohist\n\/root\/.elinks\/\n\/root\/.bash_profile\n\/root\/.tcshrc\n\/root\/aralathan.pub\n\/root\/.my.cnf\n\/root\/anaconda-ks.cfg\n\/root\/nmsql521_win_x86.zip\n\/root\/nw_linux_x86.tar.gz\n<snip>\n32477:(pid 29247):\nsave: \/root 155 records 32 KB header 855 MB data\n\nsave: \/root 855 MB estimated<\/pre>\n