Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] NFS mounts vs "ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES"

2004-05-07 11:16:13
Subject: [Veritas-bu] NFS mounts vs "ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES"
From: Mark.Donaldson AT cexp DOT com (Mark.Donaldson AT cexp DOT com)
Date: Fri, 7 May 2004 09:16:13 -0600
We're greatly increasing the use of Netapp Filers around here, all as NFS.
We don't have the ability to do NDMP at this time so we need to backup
through the NFS client server.  Easy, right?

Historically, we're multi-streaming using an ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES directive.
Well, true to the directive's name, it's only creating a list of local
filesystems and streaming them back.  The local response to the NFS
filesystems has been to cross mountpoints & NFS boundaries which does indeed
get the NFS stuff since the root mountpoint now be traversed down into the
NFS mounts and they're backed up. 

Unfortunately, as you probably know, it effectively backs the server twice,
one pass of which is a single-streamed job of the entire directory tree from
top down (from the / mountpoint).

So - the goal is: automated (no filelist maintenance) backups of the NFS
mounts as a set of multistreamed jobs, either as part of the regular
fileystem backup (as if they're local) or as part of a new policy.

I've played with a special NFS policy, trying to build automatically build
an include/exclude list combination.  One that works sweeps the vfstab file
for the mount entries (nicely ignoring the automount stuff, which is what I
want) and then uses that include/exclude combination as a backup.  Fine, but
it's singled-streamed and will take a long time on our larger servers with
lots of NFS mounts (as I suspected, the NEW_STREAM directive doesn't work in
an include list).

I then tried to make a false backup list (just /etc/hosts as a dummy file)
and the bpstart_notify job actually had the bpbackup looped against a
generated list of NFS mountpoints within the actual bpstart.  Dumb.
Circular reference, the bpstart called bpbackup which then called the
bpstart which in turn... *Sigh*  I started more than a thousand backup jobs
before I got it stopped.

So, finally I ended up with a script that's not called by the netbackup
policy but rather by cron which does the same thing.  I get what I want in
the form of a self-configuring, multi-streamed backup but I lose the
Netbackup driven schedule which is desirable.  

So - I'm out of ideas - perhaps, if you had the patience to read this far -
you have an idea I can try?

Thanks in advance,
-Mark

=================================================
  There are 10 kinds of people in the world,
  those that know binary, and those that don't.
=================================================
  Mark Donaldson - SA - Corporate Express
=================================================

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