On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 7:11 AM, Dave Markham
<dave.markham AT fjserv DOT net> wrote:
Indeed i'm not sure then if i am entitled to the latest release although we have it installed on many other platforms. The issue i have is i don't handle purchasing or quoting and am just an engineer who designs,implements,supports stuff.
This is as much Symantec's fault as it is the industry's fault. Most of us are in the same position as you are but unfortunately we have an obligation in our industry to follow the law, without any of us actually being lawyers (nor do most of us have any desire to be lawyers).
Symantec could - and should - help us here. They need to give us a licensing tool that actually works and allow the techies to validate what's installed against what's licensed and allow us an ability to get updated licenses without going through major hurdles. Ya know, when I install a license, there should be a unique key that is tracked within Symantec. When I want to upgrade, I should be able to run something on my master that generates a report of what I have, allow me to email/upload that to Symantec, and have new license keys automatically generated and sent back to me. Symantec's back-end should be able to tell whether that unique key is under maintenance or not. Today, we're still running with some 3.4 license keys and we've been trying for many years to get current licenses. And we're under maintenance!
The situation today from Symantec is that it is impossible to tell if you're fully licensed for what you're running by looking at the system anywhere. You'll see crap like "check the paper license to see how many you own". Of course, techies typically aren't allowed to keep the paper copies - that's the job of a purchasing or licensing group. Nor do we want to have to check paper copies every time to count licenses either - that's what computers are for! There's no way to correlate virtual servers with physical servers either. There's no way to restrict a license to specific server. If you have 1 advanced client license for Windows, you can run advanced functionality for all of the Windows systems since Windows installs the client functionality by default (which of course is different from Unix client installs!).
All told, NetBackup licensing is a royal mess and it's a horrendous chore for admins to manage.
.../Ed
Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD, SCSP, SCSE
ewilts AT ewilts DOT org
