Thank you all for the help on this. I'm pretty green on Networker so I have
a quick RTFM question. I am currently 'R'ing TFM, but I can't find in the DR
manual(or any other) how to go about backing up the database and indexes on
the NetWorker server itself.
My co-worker tell me that because the database is running and indexes are
changing during a backup, that networker must be stopped to get a clean backup.
You can see the chicken and egg problem that leaves me with.
The "conventional" process on this might be to rebuild the indices and/or
database from scratch on the new server. My problem is that our indices and
database covers nearly 3000 tapes and is like 70G, so doing it from scratch
is pretty much out of the question.
Is there a mechanism for Networker to hot-backup it's own DB/index files?
I'm looking through all the NetWorker Docs and can't find anything to
address this.
Perhaps it doesn't matter and I can just tell it to backup it's own
database hot and all will be well?
Thank you for all your help!
Markus
-----Original Message-----
From: George Sinclair [mailto:George.Sinclair AT noaa DOT gov]
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 7:22 AM
To: EMC NetWorker discussion; Wells, Markus
Subject: Re: [Networker] Solaris to Linux Migration
Please corroborate this with others on this listing - I hope they jump in -
but it's my understanding that it SHOULD be done from tape. The reason, or
rather one possible reason, is because you are going from one
type of endianess to another. Linux is not the same endian as Solaris.
One is big, the other is little. Can't recall which is which, and it doesn't
really matter, but that *could* be a potential gotcha. It's never been clear
to me whether the Legato software is written to care about that or take
advantage of that, and I've never been able to get a confirmed (averred)
answer one way or the other from Legato. It all depends on how the software
interprets it. Some software is written so as not to care, other packages
would care or do use the endianess to its
advantage.
It's also my understanding that if you back up and recover from tape then
the OS is not an issue and is essentially removed from the equation
as the format on tape is neutral to this. As I recall, the client indexes
can be manually copied using something like rsync, or whatever, but the
database is OS dependent and must be backed up and recovered from tape to
obviate this problem. I don't think recovering 70 GB should
take that long.
The main thing here, though, is that EMC-Legato does not support migrating
from Solaris to Linux. The last time I checked, they did not officially
sanction this. However, they say that many have done it, and that if you
carry out the procedure as you would when moving from any server to a new
server running that same OS, ie. using the standard methodology, then it
*SHOULD* work. Others who have done this claim it works, but I can't imagine
they've done extensive testing, so maybe a few spot recover tests here and
there and a few queries against the media database to make sure you get the
same results. Extensive testing would take more time than most of us have,
however. For example, if you're upgrading at the same time then you will
undoubtedly have a newer
version of mminfo wherein it's entirely possible that certain queries could
produce different results on the new server, particularly when running in
verbose mode or something that will generate more detail.
If I were doing this, I would probably manually copy the indexes and then
backup/recover the database to the new Linux server, run some queries on the
new Linux server against the media database and compare the results with
what I generated on the old Solaris box and then also run a few test
recovers, using both nwrecover and save set recover, maybe clone some older
data and a few new backups and recovers and leave
it at that.
I think you just do it, test a few things, and if all looks well, you just
hope no older legacy data becomes inaccessible later or breaks further down
the road. Another way to look at it is that you will never be 100% certain.
No way. But, you will feel better as time passes, knowing that most recovers
usually are for more recent data, which in this case would be data that was
backed up on the new host. Little succor perhaps, but what can you do?
Sooner or later, you have to set sail and leave the safe harbor behind.
George
Markus Wells wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm new here on the Networker list. I scanned the archives and
couldn't
> find much info for the issue I have at hand so I decided to post it
directly.
>
> The issue is that when we tried to migrate networker from Solaris to
Linux,
> it failed due to being unable to acccess the built-in
volume/label/whatever
> database. the person who actually did it believes it had something to
do
> with the database going from a UFS to an ext3 filesystem and Legat
just not
> liking that.
>
> I'm going to try it again, but I wanted to ask if anyone has ever
> encountered a problem like that and what a possible solution might be.
>
> I contacted Matt Hemingway who posted about a similar migration on
here and
> he said he had no issues and thought it might be due to his restoring
the
> database from tape rather than doing a rsync or scp.
>
> One other thing I should mention is that our "database" (or whatever
it's
> called in Legato/EMC speak) is over 70G as we have some 2-3000 tapes
cataloged.
>
> Any thought, hints, RTFM pointers, etc greatly appreciated.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Markus
>
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>
--
George Sinclair - NOAA/NESDIS/National Oceanographic Data Center
SSMC3 4th Floor Rm 4145 | Voice: (301) 713-3284 x210
1315 East West Highway | Fax: (301) 713-3301
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