We recently upgraded our heavily loaded Solaris 8 servers with 800 or so 
clients from 7.2.2 to 7.4.3 - then 7.4.4 in order to fix some bugs. Upgrade 
fairly straightforward - in fact 7.4.3 to 7.4.4 took a matter of minutes - just 
had to ensure our /usr/kernel/lus.conf modifications were reapplied.

Mixed feelings about new release - certainly prettier but seems to be much less 
robust than 7.2.2 and needs constant babysitting. I believe this is to do with 
the jobd functionality - we have applied all recommended tcp parameter changes, 
increased client parallelism to max for the server client resource and 
increased the size of the jobsd database as recommended elsewhere.

Still savegroups hang at 99% complete yet succeed on rerun, this gets worse 
over time until the Networker service is restarted - we find we have to do this 
once a fortnight at least. As it is restarted we see a number of daemon 
messages regarding save sessions being marked as complete in jobdb - this seems 
to fix the issues for a while. But it does mean we cannot leave Networker to 
run unattended anymore.

Other annoyances are:

nsrjb -L -R option which is supposed to allow silent relabelling of recyclable 
tapes no longer works.

certain client initiated saves do not appear in the NMC sessions window - yet 
nsrwatch shows them (may be to do with lack of group in save command - need to 
check)

All indexes are re-saved on a rerun even if only 1 client failed

The new group restart interval (we set to 23:59) precludes rerunning a group 
that happens to exceed it's 24 hr window - this was never a problem on 7.2

nwrecover GUI no longer shows the target for symbolic links - used to, and 
command line recover still does.

Good things:

Automatic inventory of tapes known to media database when deposited

Ability to sort columns in the GUI, and reporting of session data rates - very 
useful 

Operations on multiple volumes in the GUI almost obviates the need for csutom 
scripts to label tapes etc.

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