Peter,

I would certainly be interested in this.  I had been thinking about doing
something similar for some time now so it's great to hear that somebody
has already got the ball rolling.

I am using NetBackup on AIX 4.3.3 and I'd certainly be willing to test out
your module on AIX if you are making the code available.


--
Chris Rothecker
Saskatchewan Power Corporation



Fellow NBU Users:

I would like to pose the following question to the list:

         "What features would you most like to see in a perl interface to
NetBackup?"

As a perl programming exercise, I have been working on an abstract module
that provides read-access
to nearly every piece of configuration and index data within NetBackup.  I
have also successfully ported
the module to Windows such that scripts that use the module can run
un-modified on both Unix and NT
platforms (so far tested only on Solaris and Windows 2000.)

To date, I have even surprised myself at how well this programming exercise

has functioned, to the point
that I think some of you folks out there might be able to make some use of
this code (under a suitable open
source license, of course.)

I have abstracted the following commands in their entirety, returning their

output in easily-parsed perl
hash structures (in particular, I fully parse the dreaded bpdbjobs
-all_columns output, returning every single
field.)  All functions can be passed search parameters that take advantage
of perl's powerful matching syntax
to return desired subsets of data (ideal for creating functions that
monitor objects created in a certain time
period....like for a daily job success/failure report.)

##   /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/goodies/bperrcode
##   /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpclclients
##   /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpdbjobs
##   /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpimagelist
##   /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpmedialist
##   /usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmpool
##   /usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmquery
##   /usr/openv/bin/admincmd/bpconfig
##   /usr/openv/bin/admincmd/bpgetconfig
##   /usr/openv/bin/admincmd/bpstulist
##   /usr/openv/bin/admincmd/bpcllist
##   /usr/openv/bin/admincmd/bpsyncinfo
##   /usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmglob
##   /usr/openv/volmgr/bin/tpconfig

Furthermore, version information and other details stored in various text
files are accessible.

What I would like to know is this:

Would anyone be interested in this?  (I still have some documentation I
need to write on basic usage
since this is still just a low-level toolkit, but I have written a few
example scripts that illustrate the power
of the API.)

If there is interest, what features would you like to see added in the
future?  I am rather enjoying this as
a fun programming project and am looking for suggestions as to where to go
with it.  Since I spend my
free time doing this, I might as well code up things that other people find

useful.

A few things that have come to mind include:

         + A reporting framework a'la NetBackup Advanced Reporter.
         + Porting a number of the monitoring scripts that are out there so

they are cross-platform.
         + Adding command and control functions.
         + An NBU configuration auditor that looks for common problems and
errors.

If there is enough interest, I will look at setting up a mailing list for
cross-platform backup programming issues
(I'd eventually like to create toolkit interfaces to Legato
Networker,  Tivoli Storage Manager, and others, allowing
some application-independent tasks like media managment to be handled
uniformly, but I am getting way ahead
of myself there.)

--PLB



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