Fellow NBU Users:

I would like to pose the following question to the list:

         "What features would you most like to see in a perl interface to 
NetBackup?"

As a perl programming exercise, I have been working on an abstract module 
that provides read-access
to nearly every piece of configuration and index data within NetBackup.  I 
have also successfully ported
the module to Windows such that scripts that use the module can run 
un-modified on both Unix and NT
platforms (so far tested only on Solaris and Windows 2000.)

To date, I have even surprised myself at how well this programming exercise 
has functioned, to the point
that I think some of you folks out there might be able to make some use of 
this code (under a suitable open
source license, of course.)

I have abstracted the following commands in their entirety, returning their 
output in easily-parsed perl
hash structures (in particular, I fully parse the dreaded bpdbjobs 
-all_columns output, returning every single
field.)  All functions can be passed search parameters that take advantage 
of perl's powerful matching syntax
to return desired subsets of data (ideal for creating functions that 
monitor objects created in a certain time
period....like for a daily job success/failure report.)

##   /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/goodies/bperrcode
##   /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpclclients
##   /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpdbjobs
##   /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpimagelist
##   /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/admincmd/bpmedialist
##   /usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmpool
##   /usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmquery
##   /usr/openv/bin/admincmd/bpconfig
##   /usr/openv/bin/admincmd/bpgetconfig
##   /usr/openv/bin/admincmd/bpstulist
##   /usr/openv/bin/admincmd/bpcllist
##   /usr/openv/bin/admincmd/bpsyncinfo
##   /usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmglob
##   /usr/openv/volmgr/bin/tpconfig

Furthermore, version information and other details stored in various text 
files are accessible.

What I would like to know is this:

Would anyone be interested in this?  (I still have some documentation I 
need to write on basic usage
since this is still just a low-level toolkit, but I have written a few 
example scripts that illustrate the power
of the API.)

If there is interest, what features would you like to see added in the 
future?  I am rather enjoying this as
a fun programming project and am looking for suggestions as to where to go 
with it.  Since I spend my
free time doing this, I might as well code up things that other people find 
useful.

A few things that have come to mind include:

         + A reporting framework a'la NetBackup Advanced Reporter.
         + Porting a number of the monitoring scripts that are out there so 
they are cross-platform.
         + Adding command and control functions.
         + An NBU configuration auditor that looks for common problems and 
errors.

If there is enough interest, I will look at setting up a mailing list for 
cross-platform backup programming issues
(I'd eventually like to create toolkit interfaces to Legato 
Networker,  Tivoli Storage Manager, and others, allowing
some application-independent tasks like media managment to be handled 
uniformly, but I am getting way ahead
of myself there.)

--PLB