Hello Mark

You may want to filter your logs for start times within the last half hour of
your backup window.   If you've been consistently getting starts in the last
part of your backup window then that means that you were pretty much maxing out
your backup window and have just cross the threshold where you cannot start all
your backups within the specified window.   If this is the case then your
choices are:
     a) negotiate with users for a broader backup window
     b) negotiate with users to alternate day backups instead of daily or shift
the days for the weekly backups.
     c) buy more drives

If your logs show that normally you have not been maxing out your backup window
(note pay heed to the window for your full backups as they represent the worst
case scenario) then I would filter for long elapsed times.   Backups that used
to run within reasonable timeframes but now no longer do could be indicative of
either a change in usage patterns (can be verified by looking at kilobytes
written in the logs) or an indication of networking problems i.e.: somebody
kinked a cat 5 cable or a switch is developing some faulty memory and is
dropping packets.   By analyzing your logs, you should be able to identify which
hosts are affected and by comparing with your wiring diagrams (provided you have
one) you should be able to identify your problem areas.

Note, people tend to max out their backup windows by trying to do all the full
backups during an arbitrary window determined politically such as full backups
on weekends or full backups on the first weekend of the month.   The NetBackup
manual suggests setting the retry interval relatively frequently, the retry
count relatively large, define all available backup windows for all the
schedules and just vary the frequency settings.   This allows the scheduler to
shift the backups till they all find a time where they can run i.e.:  you may
not know which day of the week the full will run but it will run once every
seven days and all the various clients will spread themselves out over the
available days till they all fit into the backup windows.   Unfortunately, this
approach runs counter to political concerns unless a mechanism exists to prevent
backups from running beyond the backup window and near as I can tell Netbackup
only works by start times and is therefore subject to window over-runs.   It
also produces some really bad looking logs till it manages to settle down.

Pity that Netbackup doesn't seem to have a way to log when it's scheduler has
gone idle so that you get an idea as to where in your backup window you are and
can argue for schedule adjustments accordingly before you start having problems.
Oh well, another item for the wish list.

Regards,
John I Wang
Sr. Systems Engineer
Steverson Information Professionals

---
Enron Broadband Services
Enron Building 1472c
ph (713) 345-4291
fax (713) 646-8063


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  |       To:     veritas-bu AT eng.auburn DOT edu                           |
  |       cc:     (bcc: John Wang/Contractor/Enron Communications)    |
  |       Subject:     [Veritas-bu] Netbackup error status 196        |
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I have set-up and configured netbackup 3.4g on Solaris 2.6 using L280 juke
boxes, The backups have been running successfully for some time. I have
started to get nightly failures on several servers. 1: (196) client backup
was not attempted because backup window closed.

Any help would be grateful. I can't find this error on any web sites.

Regards

Mark Hall
Unix SA
Treasury Technology
E Mail : markhall AT halifax.co DOT uk

Halifax Group Treasury & Wholesale Banking
33 Old Broad Street
London
EC2N 1HZ


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Registered in England No. 2367076.  Registered Office: Trinity Road, Halifax,
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