{"id":1195,"date":"2009-10-20T04:05:32","date_gmt":"2009-10-19T18:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.wordpress.com\/?p=1195"},"modified":"2009-10-20T04:05:32","modified_gmt":"2009-10-19T18:05:32","slug":"quibbles-directive-management-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2009\/10\/20\/quibbles-directive-management-redux\/","title":{"rendered":"Quibbles \u2013\u00a0Directive Management Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A while ago, I made a posting about a long-running annoyance I have with <a title=\"Quibbles - Directive Management\" href=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2009\/09\/03\/quibbles-directive-management\/\" target=\"_blank\">directive management in NetWorker<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This time I want to expand slightly upon it, thanks mainly to some recent discussions with customers that pointed out an obvious and annoying additional lack of flexibility in directive management.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s to do with the complete inability to apply directives \u2013 particularly the <em>skip<\/em> or the <em>null<\/em> directive, against &#8220;special&#8221; savesets. By &#8220;special&#8221; I&#8217;m referring to savesets that aren&#8217;t part of standard filesystem backups yet are still effectively just a bunch of files.<\/p>\n<p>Such as say:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>SYSTEM FILES:<\/li>\n<li>SYSTEM STATE:<\/li>\n<li>ASR:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(And so on.)<\/p>\n<p>In short, NetWorker provides no way of skipping these savesets while still using the &#8220;All&#8221; special saveset for Windows clients. You can&#8217;t do any of the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Hand craft a server-side directive<\/li>\n<li>Hand craft a client-side directive<\/li>\n<li>Use the directive management option in the client GUI (winworkr) to create a directive to skip these styles of savesets.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>OK, the last point is just slightly inaccurate. Yes, you can create the directive using this method \u2013 but:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The created directive is not honoured, either when left as is, or by transferring to a more standard directive;<\/li>\n<li>The created directive is &#8220;lost&#8221; when you next load winworkr&#8217;s directive management option. Clearly it lets you create directives that aren&#8217;t valid and it subsequently won&#8217;t deal with.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Why does this suck? For a very important reason \u2013 in some situations you don&#8217;t want to have to back these up, <em>or you can&#8217;t back them up<\/em>. For instance, on certain OS levels and bitness using clusters, you will get an error if you try to backup the ASR: saveset.<\/p>\n<p>This creates a requirement to either:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Accept that you&#8217;ll get an error every day in your backup report (<a title=\"What is a Zero Error Policy?\" href=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2009\/08\/11\/what-is-a-zero-error-policy\/\" target=\"_blank\">completely unacceptable<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>Switch from exclusionary backups to inclusionary backups (highly unpalatable and risky)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Clearly then the option is the second, not the first. This though is effectively removing an error by introducing poor backup systems management into the environment.<\/p>\n<p>It would be nice if this problem &#8220;went away&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A while ago, I made a posting about a long-running annoyance I have with directive management in NetWorker. This time&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_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}},"categories":[16,18],"tags":[107,122,325,917],"class_list":["post-1195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-networker","category-quibbles","tag-all","tag-asr","tag-directives","tag-special-savesets"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-jh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}