{"id":360,"date":"2009-05-04T17:00:04","date_gmt":"2009-05-04T07:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.wordpress.com\/?p=360"},"modified":"2018-12-12T16:16:41","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T06:16:41","slug":"client-operating-systems-should-not-be-changed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2009\/05\/04\/client-operating-systems-should-not-be-changed\/","title":{"rendered":"Client operating systems should not be changed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While researching an issue today I was reminded of a problem I had a few years ago that still remains quite valid.<\/p>\n<p>Client operating systems must not be changed. To be more specific, client <em>platforms<\/em> must not be changed \u2013 at least while keeping the same client name.<\/p>\n<p>The reason for this is that index data is incompatible between client platforms. That is, if you&#8217;ve been backing up the machine &#8216;cerberus&#8217; which is a Linux machine, then the machine is rebuilt as a Windows machine, <em>it must be renamed<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Failing to rename a client in these circumstances can result in index corruption. This may manifest in one of three different ways:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Inability to backup at all.<\/li>\n<li>Backups may consistently fail at specific points.<\/li>\n<li>Backups may succeed but recoveries may fail.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Now, there may be some workarounds, and I&#8217;ll profess to having tried some of them out in lab environments, but let me be blunt: this causes <strong>so many problems<\/strong> (and is so unrecommended by EMC) that changing a client operating system (platform) should <em>never<\/em> be done <strong>without the client being renamed as well<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>This may be done by either:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Creating a new client name entirely for the rebuilt machine<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>or<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Using the standard procedure for first <em>renaming<\/em> the machine in NetWorker before the rebuild, so that when the new operating system is configured in NetWorker with the &#8216;previous&#8217; name, there is <em>no namespace clash or client ID similarities<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Trust me, if you don&#8217;t do one of the above when a client operating system is changed, at some point you will come a cropper.<\/p>\n<p><strong>[2009-05-10]<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I thought I&#8217;d come back and add output from a backup attempt to show what happens when you do this. Here&#8217;s the scenario \u2013 I created a client called &#8216;dopey&#8217;*, installed <a title=\"CentOS\" href=\"http:\/\/www.centos.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">CentOS<\/a> 5, ran a full + incremental backup, then reinstalled &#8216;dopey&#8217; as a Windows 2003 machine. Here&#8217;s (some of) the output from that backup, using NetWorker 7.5.1 as the server and client in all 3 instances:<\/p>\n<pre>[root@nox ~]# savegrp -l full -c dopey idata\n40473:savegrp: command ' save -s nox.anywebdb.com -g idata -LL -m dopey -l full -q -W 78 -N \"VSS ASR DISK:\\\" \"VSS ASR DISK:\\\"' for client dopey exited with return code 5.\n7336:savegrp: Log file \/nsr\/tmp\/sg\/idata\/sso.dopey.pSMS7s is empty.\n68703:savegrp: savegrp:idata * dopey:VSS ASR DISK: Cannot determine status of backup process.&nbsp; Use mminfo to determine job status.\n\n7341:savegrp: dopey:VSS ASR DISK: unexpectedly exited.\n(snip)40473:savegrp: command ' save -s nox.anywebdb.com -g idata -LL -m dopey -l full -q -W 78 -N \"C:\\\" \"C:\\\"' for client dopey exited with return code 5.\n7336:savegrp: Log file \/nsr\/tmp\/sg\/idata\/sso.dopey.BlOmrS is empty.\n68703:savegrp: savegrp:idata * dopey:C: Cannot determine status of backup process.&nbsp; Use mminfo to determine job status.\n\n7341:savegrp: dopey:C: unexpectedly exited.<\/pre>\n<p>As you can see, we&#8217;re just not getting a successful backup at all, since NetWorker is unable to merge the index entries from the two incompatible platforms.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;<br \/>\n* Currently running through and naming test machines based on the Seven Dwarves from Snow White, that&#8217;s all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While researching an issue today I was reminded of a problem I had a few years ago that still remains&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":[15,16,27],"tags":[224,466],"class_list":["post-360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","category-networker","category-windows","tag-client-platform","tag-index-corruption"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-5O","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360","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=360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7664,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360\/revisions\/7664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}