{"id":9414,"date":"2020-04-05T15:13:16","date_gmt":"2020-04-05T05:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=9414"},"modified":"2020-04-11T10:03:35","modified_gmt":"2020-04-11T00:03:35","slug":"networker-basics-a-simple-prototype-web-based-nsrwatch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2020\/04\/05\/networker-basics-a-simple-prototype-web-based-nsrwatch\/","title":{"rendered":"NetWorker Basics \u2013\u00a0A Simple Prototype Web-Based nsrwatch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There’s a misconception at the moment that we’ve all naturally got tonnes of spare time on our hands because a significant population of the world is staying indoors to keep away from COVID19. I say it’s a misconception<\/em> because there’s still a bunch of things many of us have to do on a daily basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did have some spare time this weekend, and since my RSI is making Minecraft a little too painful, I decided the next best entertainment would be to delve further into NetWorker REST API programming. It started over my third or eight Saturday morning coffee\u2014I can’t recall which, but it couldn’t have been too many since I still couldn’t see ultraviolet\u2014and I wondered could I write a basic web-based nsrwatch using the NetWorker REST API?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To avoid a long, drawn-out story with too much suspense, the TL;DR for the question is, yes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Prototype NSR Webwatch<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Now, that’s not an exact recreation of nsrwatch<\/em> \u2013 I figured I’d start by focusing on a few key things: sessions, devices and volumes. (In retrospect, volumes may not have been the most dynamic of choices, but I stuck with it.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s start with the architecture I came up with. My first thought was that I didn’t want to assume the ‘service’, if you’d call the prototype, would run on the NetWorker server itself. So I decided on a simple communication strategy that’s one step removed from a sneakernet: there’d be a service that would probe the NetWorker server via the REST API, writing data files, and then there’d be a web front-end that would read those files to work out what to display. The system flow, therefore, ended up looking like the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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webwatch system flow<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Unlike the previous REST API example<\/strong><\/a> where the script would prompt for the server, username and password, this time I’ve hard-coded them. I know, not a good idea for security, but I wanted to keep it simple. So I configured a new user account in NMC and NetWorker called watcher<\/em> which was mapped only to having NetWorker monitoring privileges:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Creating a “watcher” user (part 1 of 2)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Creating a “watcher” user (part 2 of 2)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With that user created, I was happy enough to create the webwatch.pl<\/em> script. As you may imagine by the extension, this is another Perl script. I know, everyone says that to be a fancy-pants REST API programmer you should use Python, but I’ve decided to stick with Perl for a while longer yet. To create the script, I had to install the following additional modules:<\/p>\n\n\n\n