Networker

Re: [Networker] incompatibilities between different Networker ver sions

2003-01-07 09:06:46
Subject: Re: [Networker] incompatibilities between different Networker ver sions
From: Sumash Singh <sumashs AT SOURCECONSULTING.CO DOT ZA>
To: NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 16:01:11 +0200
my 20c worth

Hrvoje Crvelin wrote:
> >
> > > Hot line said me that it could be a problem.
> > This may cause some trouble.  I do not agree with
> > arguments You gave. They do stand for 6.0.x and
> > 6.1.x (and there is no problem up to my knowledge),
> > but difference between 6.x and 5.x is rather big
> > so mixing those may result in problems.  Legato is
> > not some kind of isolated example here - almost all
> > software companies to this.  And there are good
> > reasons for that if You think for a moment.
>
> I don't want to start a flame war. I only want to tell why
> I'm not happy
> with networker.

tsk tsk you have started already

>
> OK ! I think only that if there are incompatibilities, software should
> detect it and show an alert message. This is how quality software
> companies do !
>
> Let's talk about other examples :
>
> - recently, I needed to restore two disk partitions (Solaris) - a 9 GB
> partitions, 50 % full - home dir of 260 users on each partition.
>
> So I launched nwrecover and select (mark) the top of the
> partition. When
> I did this, nwrecover froze. I waited some 15 minutes and
> killed it and
> restarted again for some half hour. As I saw the same behaviour, I
> changed the way to restore.

have you ever tried doing a listing of 1000's of files in a directroy on
either a unix or a windows box and seen how long it takes. this is an
operating system overhead to build a list of all files in the directory
structure. likewise networker lists every single file in a directory you
want to restore. i am sure that you can use some OS tools like TOP for
solaris or basic truss -p PID to check the state of the process.

>
> So intead of selecting the top of the partition, I went into the
> partition and tried to select all directories inside the partition.
>
> So when I selected each directory, It tooks some time to show the mark
> telling the selection was done. I did this for each 260 directories in
> each partition.

i seem to miss this point: Are you saying that since you cannot restore the
root of the partition you have to subsequently mark each directroy?

>
> What's wrong ?
> - There is no selection tool to select a group of
> directories. I needed
> to repeat the same operation 520 times.
> - There is no message indicating the operation progression. If an
> operation takes some time, software usually shall set up some way to
> indicating task progression.
>

Again, what do you mean? do you have to mark one directroy at a time and
then restore ???


> I finaly understood that when I selected the top of the partition,
> nwrecover was realy working, and not frozen.
>

it is a give that the way you restore should be taken into account when you
backup. iow, why even do this directory by directory recovery when doing a
saveset recovery will yield better results?? understandably, you want to
select each and every directroy, but maybe you should structure a backup
policy that will yield you better results when restaoring?


> What's wrong ? It could be a good thing to to setup some way to tell
> user that the process isn't dead, but working. Something such a bar
> indicating % of work done, or at least a message each minute saying
> "Hello, I'm alive. Don't kill me, please !".
>
> I have many examples like this one. It doesn't seems to me
> necessary to
> tell you all of them.
>
Abt the incompatibily/backward compatibility story, i agree with all who
suggested that maintaining a server which is soon to be EOL is bad admin
practice. After all, when MS anounces EOL for Windows NT they mean it don't
they/

Criticism is good, but with a flexible product like NetWorker, there are
many ways to skin the cat, you just have to know who toi talk to, and this
list is the best starting point.


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