This assessment of 7.4.4 pretty much mirrors our experience with it so
far. 

Shortly after we upgraded to 7.4.4 (on win23k, ~100 clients), we started
having failures of our Exchange backups. Upgrading the Exchange module
has helped with those issues for the most part. We have also had
problems with some groups hanging, but upgrading the clients to at least
7.2 or above has helped significantly with that. It does seem to need
more overall babysitting and at least a weekly stop/restart of the
server processes to keep the jobsdb happy and healthy...otherwise we see
more groups hanging / failing and overall problems if we don't.  


> -----Original Message-----
> From: EMC NetWorker discussion 
> [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On Behalf Of soupdragon
> Sent: Saturday, February 28, 2009 5:21 PM
> To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
> Subject: [Networker] v7.4.2 to v7.4.4
> 
> 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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