John,

The approach is correct, the Novell admins at this company would appear to
be lacking knowledge and experience.

Our company has backed up our remote Netware servers in the U.S. and at
international sites over WAN links, some as small as switched-56.  It works
and works well.  Client side compression is a must!  Keep in mind, the
first backup will take quite some time.  We had a few servers that took
several days because we would kill the backup during business hours and let
it resume at the next scheduled backup time.

The approach to restoring a remote server on hardware at a central site
where the TSM server is located is a good one.  We have used this approach
dozens of times and it works great.  There are also much better ways to
swap hardware in the field than doing complete rebuilds.  BMR would be
largely a waste of time and money as it is not needed.

If you would like to know more, feel free to drop me an email at
ticeg(at)schneider.com and we can make arrangements to talk.  No money
involved here, I just don't have time to write it all down.


Regards,

Greg Tice
Green Bay, WI




John Schneider <jdschn AT ATTGLOBAL DOT NET>
Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>
20.11.2002 18:24
Please respond to jdschn


        To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
        cc:
        Subject:        Novell bare-metal restore


Greetings,
    I have a customer with a unique challenge.  Maybe it's not, but it
seems to be to me because I am not a Novell guy.  They are considering
implementing TSM in their environment to back up a bunch of Novell
servers that are out in remote plants with real slow links, like 256KBs.
 The servers have sometimes 300-600MB of changed data a night.  With
decent compression, we may be able to back them up overnight, since they
would permit 5pm to 8am as the acceptable backup window.
    The challenge is when one server is replaced, either because it dies
or is replaced with new hardware.  The Novell servers have about 40GB of
disk space, so there is no way they could restore across the slow link.
 Our thinking is to restore the server to a server at the central
location where the TSM server is, so the restore could be accomplished
more quickly, then ship the restored server down to the remote site.  My
customer's Novell guy says this won't work, because of the way Novell
trees work.  You can't restore the Novell server at the central site
because it won't be part of the Novell tree(?!), and all the file
permissions and ownerships will be wrong.
    Can somebody tell me what resources I should read to understand how
to do this, or can share with me your methodology to do a bare-metal
restore of a Novell server?  I figure that surely by now a method has
been derived.
    Thanks in advance,

John Schneider