{"id":1309,"date":"2009-11-16T16:07:52","date_gmt":"2009-11-16T06:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.wordpress.com\/?p=1309"},"modified":"2009-11-16T16:07:52","modified_gmt":"2009-11-16T06:07:52","slug":"quibbles-why-cant-i-rename-clients-in-the-gui","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2009\/11\/16\/quibbles-why-cant-i-rename-clients-in-the-gui\/","title":{"rendered":"Quibbles &#8211; Why can&#8217;t I rename clients in the GUI?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For what it&#8217;s worth, I believe that the continuing lack of support for renaming clients as a function within NMC, (as opposed to the current, highly manual process), represents an annoying and non-trivial gap in functionality that causes administrators headaches and undue work.<\/p>\n<p>For me, this was highlighted most recently when a customer of mine needed to shift their primary domain, and all clients had been created using the fully qualified domain name. All <em>500<\/em> clients. Not 5, not 50, but 500.<\/p>\n<p>The current mechanisms for renaming clients may be &#8220;OK&#8221; if you only rename one client a year, but more and more often I&#8217;m seeing sites renaming up to 5 clients a year as a regular course of action. If most of my customers are doing it, surely they&#8217;re not unique.<\/p>\n<p>Renaming clients in NetWorker is a pain. And I don&#8217;t mean a &#8220;oops I just trod on a pin&#8221; style pain, but a &#8220;oh no, I just impaled my foot on a 6 inch rusty nail&#8221; style pain. It typically involves:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Taking care to note client ID<\/li>\n<li>Recording the client configuration for all instances of the client<\/li>\n<li>Deleting all instances of the client<\/li>\n<li>Rename the index directory<\/li>\n<li>Recreate all instances of the client, being sure on first instance creation to include the original client ID<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(If the client is explicitly named in pool resources, they have to be updated as well, first clearing the client from those pools and then re-adding the newly &#8220;renamed&#8221; client.)<\/p>\n<p><em>This is not fun stuff<\/em>. Further, the chance for human error in the above list is substantial, and when we&#8217;re playing with indices, human error can result in situations where it becomes very problematic to either facilitate restores or ensure that backup dependencies have appropriate continuity.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I know that facilitating a client rename from within a GUI isn&#8217;t easy, particularly since the NMC server may not be on the same host as the NetWorker server. There&#8217;s a bunch of (potential pool changes), client resource changes, filesystem changes and the need to put in appropriate rollback code so that if the system aborts half-way through it can revert at least to the old client name.<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve argued in the past though, just because something isn&#8217;t easy doesn&#8217;t mean it shouldn&#8217;t be done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For what it&#8217;s worth, I believe that the continuing lack of support for renaming clients as a function within NMC,&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":[220,419,464,638,1251,818],"class_list":["post-1309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-networker","category-quibbles","tag-client","tag-gui","tag-index","tag-nmc","tag-quibbles","tag-rename"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-l7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309","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=1309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}