Paula,

I replied to another person about this, but for some reason my reply went
solely to him -- not the list.

We back up approximately 250 NT/2k boxes to Solaris servers, running
NetWorker 6.1.3.  We have no problems doing so.  Although there are lots
of factors involved in successful backups of these boxes, we've done a few
things to maximize the likelihood of success:

* force NICs on the clients AND the network switch to be 100/full.  Do not
allow clients to run at an autonegotiated speed/duplex.
* set the savegroup inactivity to 0 unless there's some really good reason
to have it set to a non-zero number.  This way, if your *server*
parallelism is a lot smaller than the total # of savesets to be saved as
part of the group, you don't have oodles of savesets waiting in the wings
-- and eventually timing out.
* (not sure why this makes a difference, but it seems to help some) Strive
for version like-ness between client and server.   For example, if your
NSR server is running 6.1.3, try to run >=6.1.1 on your clients (however,
Legato will tell you not to run a newer client version than your server
version.)
* verify that your directives are set up properly.   I recently came upon
a NetWorker server in which the "NT standard directives" had been modified
to compress all files, and then compress them again, and then compress
them again, which had the effect of making the client's CPUs work very
hard at compressing files instead of sending them across.
* speaking of compression, if at all possible leave the compression to the
tape drives and don't use the "NT with compression directive" (or whatever
it's called, out of the box.)   From your post, I'm not sure what kind of
tape drive(s) you're using, but with a properly set-up DLT8000 drive on a
Solaris 8 server we have achieved 45-60 GB/tape for NT data and up to 170
GB/tape for UNIX data.

Hope this helps!
-ty

Phillip T. ("Ty") Young, DMA
Backup/Recovery Systems Mgr.
Network Services Group
i2 Technologies, Inc.




Paula Ehn <pehn AT CC.UMANITOBA DOT CA>
Sent by: Legato NetWorker discussion <NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU>
04/30/2003 09:44 AM
Please respond to Paula Ehn


        To:     NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU
        cc:
        Subject:        Re: [Networker] How reliable our your windows backups?


Presently, we backup about ~40 Solaris boxes and very reliably. It has
been
dictated from higher up that we look at backing up NT/W2k servers.

>From this thread, it seems like we might be opening the flood gates to
many
problems and reliability issues.

What type of problems have people been having with NT/W2k server backups
to a
Solaris backup server?
I also heard that there was in the past a problem with backing up the
Windows
registry. Is this still a problem?

Thanks!
Paula

On Mon, 28 Apr 2003 16:01:20 -0400, Joel Fisher <jfisher AT WFUBMC DOT EDU>
wrote:

>I have noticed the exact same pattern.  We have a different mix 130NT
>and 40Unix.  But there are very rarely problems with the Unix clients,
>while there is almost never a night that doesn't have NT failures.  I've
>not figured out a way to make the NT clients more reliable (then again
>neither has Bill).
>
>If any NT gurus have figured this out I'd like to hear what they've done
>also.
 -----------------------------------------------------------------
| Paula Ehn  VE4MHZ/VE4HZ                    Room 624 Eng.        |
| Unix System Administrator                  pehn AT cc.umanitoba DOT ca |
| Academic Computing and Networking          (204)474-7849        |
| University of Manitoba                     Fax: (204) 474-7920  |
 -----------------------------------------------------------------

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