Networker

Re: [Networker] Hidden verbose savegroup option?

2005-08-12 10:30:59
Subject: Re: [Networker] Hidden verbose savegroup option?
From: Ty Young <Phillip_Young AT I2 DOT COM>
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 09:24:39 -0500
George, I think I know what you're referring to.

(Under NW7x, but I think it worked under 6.x as well) If you manually kick
off a savegroup from the command-line with

      savegrp -vvv

you can watch the backups progress as details concerning not only savesets,
i.e. which files are backed up during an incremental, etc. but also things
like client versions, # of CPUs on the client, etc.    This used to be a
tool Legato Support suggested for use with the Probe option of savegroup
(i.e. savegrp -vvv -p) which would basically check for connectivity between
the server's nsrd and the client's nsrexec[d] processes.

What I have found more recently is that using the "-vvv" flag when running
actual backups can be very dangerous. The reason is that (as you have
correctly said below) the 'vvv' option turns on something in NetWorker to
make it generate a file-by-file listing in /nsr/tmp of everything backed up
for a given saveset.  If you (like I have in the past) do this with a large
(i.e. 1 TB) saveset, the temp file can become very large very quickly.
If this becomes too large, apparently NetWorker chokes on it and deletes
the file.  If, upon saveset backup completion, NetWorker can't find that
file [because it was previously deleted] it restarts the backups from 0 MB.

I've opened more than one case with Legato on this and simply been told
"yeah, well, don't do that"  with respect to the '-vvv' specification in
the savegrp command.

Thoughts?

-ty

Phillip T. ("Ty") Young, DMA
Manager, Data Center and Backup/Recovery Services
Information Services
i2 Technologies, Inc.


                                                                           
             George Sinclair                                               
             <George.Sinclair@                                             
             NOAA.GOV>                                                  To 
             Sent by: Legato           NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU     
  
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             <NETWORKER@LISTSE                                     Subject 
             RV.TEMPLE.EDU>            [Networker] Hidden verbose          
                                       savegroup option?                   
                                                                           
             08/12/2005 09:16                                              
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             Please respond to                                             
             Legato NetWorker                                              
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             <NETWORKER@LISTSE                                             
              RV.TEMPLE.EDU>;                                              
             Please respond to                                             
              George Sinclair                                              
             <George.Sinclair@                                             
                 NOAA.GOV>                                                 
                                                                           
                                                                           




How do you enable the hidden verbose savegroup option? How do you use
this to see what a client's backup is doing?

Someone mentioned this the other day in a reply to the "Problem with
ending a savegroup" posting. Something about being able to then do a
tail on a file in  /nsr/tmp.
I never see anything under /nsr/tmp except some lock files and a 'sec'
directory that's essentially empty. What file would this be? Also, I
should note that /nsr/tmp has not been updated at any time recently on
any clients I look at. Not sure what info it would contain that would be
useful?

George

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