On 12/30/2006 11:31 PM, David Rock wrote:
> * Ed Wilts <ewilts at ewilts.org> [2006-12-30 08:50]:
>> With a Solaris (or other Unixy) master server, why fight the battle? 
>> Simply push out new clients out to _all_ of your Solaris clients. 
>> NetBackup will skip over the clients that are up to date and update 
>> those that need it.  The update to a Unixy client is trivial and usually 
>> transparent although I am waiting for the 6.5 release where Symantec has 
>> done a MUCH nicer job of handling client updates.
> 
> That sounds like a great idea.. oh, wait.  I can't use rsh because
> that's blocked by the firewall and it's turned off on most of the
> clients anyway because it's insecure on many levels (so is ftp).  I can
> hack the script to use scp instead, but why should I have to fix
> something that should have been done a loong time ago by
> Veritas/Symantec?  

You do not need rsh or ftp to _update_ a client - you only need one of 
them to install the client.

> Sorry, spinal reflex/complaint.  There are so many.  ;-)
> 
> I think it's pretty obvious I'm not afraid to hack stupid things to get
> them to work right.  Unfortunately, you can also have issues when you
> are not the admins of the client systems.  And then there's Windows...

No hacking required.  At least for Unix clients.  For Windows clients 
there is still no good way.

> Realistically, the biggest reason for NOT being able to do that is
> change control.  Just asking the client what it has does not involve two
> days of justifcation and meetings about why you want to update clients.

Can't help there...

> So, one more plea for someone at Symantec to get off their behinds and
> actually UPDATE the $!@#@! version strings, please!!

I think that this was finally addressed in 6.5 - much work was done on 
the client side support.  You can actually have policies that allow you 
to update clients (guarantees that there are no active jobs, allows you 
to have separate policies for example your dev, staging, or production 
clients), use LiveUpdate for Windows clients, etc.  This was discussed 
at a recent Symantec Tech Day and it does look like they finally got it 
right.  And they're swearing up and down that the delta from 6.0 to 6.5 
is nowhere near the delta of 5.1 to 6.0.  And for those that think they 
can skip over 6.0, forget about it - the core changes that were made 
going to 6.0 still have to be done...

        .../Ed

-- 
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org