Guys we have a strange upgrade predicament i could do with running by 
the scene. I am splitting this into 2 threads to find pros/cons of 2 
solutions im thinking about. Also to try and keep the mail shorter.

Current Situation :-

Sun E220R (running Solaris 8) Netbackup Server with attached L1000 tape 
unit + 4 x DLT drives. Netbackup 5.0MP7.
Hardware is beyond old but customer is reluctant to upgrade. We have 
told them we cannot support the L1000 unit and their backups are at 
risk. It has gone EOSL and parts are increasingly hard to source.

The initial proposal is to replace with an SL24 tape unit and LTO3 drives.

Problem :-

We are requesting a SCSI Ultra320 HBA to install and attach the new SL24 
unit onto. Problem is the card is not compatible with the Solaris 8 
(release 06/00) which is installed.  We therefore need to upgrade 
solaris. Disk space is very limited (2 x internal 18gig disks raid 1) 
and doing an OS upgrade wouldn't leave us with much of a regression path.

Proposal 1.

One thought is to buy 2 * 36 gig disks. We have a spare E220R we could 
build a Solaris9 release on as fresh install and it would include the 
mpt drivers for the card.
We could then install Netbackup and attach the SL24 and get everything 
working in a test environment.
Then ship the disks, hba and SL24 down to datacenter and swap them with 
the current disks in the server.
Perform a reconfigure reboot and voilà hopefully all would be working.

This leads to some issues :-

As it would be a fresh Netbackup install it would have no knowledge of 
old backups. We are proposing leaving the L1000 connected initially, but 
turning it on after /dev/rmt links are created with the SL24. This is so 
the L1000 drives will appear later and i can just re-add the L1000 as a 
new storage unit.

Questions :-

I'm assuming i can't recover the Netbackup catalogues onto a new 
Netbackup install as it will overwrite my newly created SL24 storage 
unit. Is this correct?

Could i recover only certain portions of the catalogue? e.g 
/opt/openv/netbackup/db only?

Could i transfer disk copies of the catalogues (bpbackup -dpath) up to 
my test environment, restore them and then configure the new SL24. Then 
when i transfer the disks and kit down to the datacenter and swap in to 
the machine with the L1000 i'd simply discover that device and call the 
L1000 storage unit the same as what it was and this would allow me to do 
restores from the L1000 ?

The end game is to be able to duplicate some older L1000 written backup 
images onto new LTO3 tapes. I'm assuming i can do this with bpduplicate 
and specify the old storage unit and backup images i should now have 
recovered. Does this seem like a viable option?

Other alternative is to not do a bprecover and do lots of L1000 tape 
imports to build the old images information. Problem with that is 
customer will have long period of inability to restore older images.

Scenario 2 to follow is around having a whole new server with new 
version of Netbackup 6 on.

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