[Networker] Another client retention problem

Hi,

After reading through the recent thread about a client retention problem, I
noted that I am experiencing a similar problem.  But it doesn't seem that
the recent thread didn't quite resolve my issue  (or maybe it did but I
didn't understand how to resolve it).

Here is my situation.

We are running Networker Network Edition 6.1.3 Build 428 on HP-UX 11i, fully
patched upto October 2002.  Our clients are a mix of Sun/HP.

I have a group of client machines that have incremental saves performed each
night except for Sunday.  On Sunday a full backup is performed.  The setup
is like this:

        Pool: DailySaves
        Schedule: incr Mon-Sat, full Sunday
        Browse Policy: Month
        Retention Policy: Quarter

So all the backups that are performed are written to the same tape pool.
One of the Networker clients is the Networker server itself (we have a bunch
of BCV volumes that get mounted onto the Networker server for backups).

The above setup has worked fine for us until....  We wanted the full save of
the BCV volumes on the Networker server to go to a different pool and have a
three year retention policy, while keeping the Monday-Saturday incrementals
going as shown above.  To do this, in the client setup, I copied the
Networker Server client entry and changed the copy's settings to this:

        Pool: Offsite
        Schedule: full Sunday, skip all other days
        Browse Policy: Quarter
        Retention Policy: 3 Years

The other (already existing) entry for our Networker server was changed to
this:

        Pool: DailySaves
        Schedule: Incr Mon-Sat, skip Sunday
        Browse Policy: Month
        Retention Policy: Quarter

So in the client list, there are two entries for our Networker server. One
is used to perform the daily incrementals (Monday - Saturday) and the second
one does the full on Sunday.

After implementing this configuration, the tapes in *BOTH* pools (the
DailySaves and Offsite) began to have a retention of 3 years, even though in
the client setup, for the clients that use the DailySaves pool, the browse
policy is Month and the retention policy is Quarter. It appears that these
settings are getting overwritten by the one client (which happens to be the
Networker server) that is setup to write to the Offsite pool on Sunday and
the DailySaves pool on all other days.

What we really want is for Networker to honor the browse and retention
policies that are set in the client properties.  Even though our Networker
server has two client entries (so that we can write backups from each entry
to different tape pools and use different schedules), Networker should set a
tape's retention policy based on the save sets written to the individual
tape, not based on a retention policy that's used for a save set which isn't
even written to the tape's pool.

Is there any way around this issue?  It doesn't cause us any big problem
right now because we have a set number of tapes in the DailySaves pool and
manually recycle the oldest tapes when there is none to write to (tapes
usually get recycled once every 35 days or so).  Its just annoying to have a
retention policy of save sets being written to one tape pool be used on save
sets in a different tape pool.

--
Craig Ruefenacht
UNIX Systems Administrator
USANA Health Sciences, Inc.
http://www.usana.com



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