Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] Re: Converting catalog form Solaris to Windows 2003

2007-07-16 01:30:25
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Re: Converting catalog form Solaris to Windows 2003
From: ewilts <netbackup-forum AT backupcentral DOT com>
To: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 12:40:27 -0700

cpreston wrote:
> I think your comment is confusing two issues:
> * Moving from Unix -> Windows
> * Changing the name of the master server
> 

Part of the problem is usually people want to do both at the same time.


> As to "if you have to ask, then you don't have the skill," I understand
> what you're saying, but I don't agree with it.  I'd say "if you don't
> understand the process, then don't try it."  Or "If you haven't tested
> the process every way back and forth, then don't do it."  Or "Don't you
> dare use the new server until you've verified that everything made it
> over."

The issue here is that a lot of people will simply "follow the instructions" 
rather than "follow the process".  And that can get you in serious trouble.  I 
agree that in theory, we should be able to tell somebody how it's done, but 
sure enough, some manager will order somebody to follow the instructions, the 
person won't know exactly what they're doing, will run into something 
unexpected, and be lost.  They won't be able to recover from their backups 
since they've just corrupted the NetBackup catalog, and Symantec won't be too 
eager to help because what they were doing was unsupported in the first place.  
It's a hairy place to go...


> All I'm trying to see is if we can get someone to talk about what they did 
> when to see if we can get this sucker documented.

Great in theory, but I am not sure it's practical because the target keeps 
moving.  We did the migration in 3.4 and I'm sure it's quite a bit different in 
6.0.  If somebody just does a google, found the steps that I might have posted 
and followed them on 6.0, it's not going to work very well.

What I think (KNOW!) we need is a Symantec-support process for doing this.  A 
catalog recovery should be do-able cross-platform and there should be a 
supported, documented mechanism for renaming master servers and media servers.  
This is not the kind of thing that end users should have to fight with and 
reverse engineer with every release.

Changing a master server name does get tricky because you need to touch every 
client and if you get things in the wrong order, you won't be able to get to 
the clients any more because you've locked yourself out and now have to visit 
them all manually.

Symantec has know about these needs for many years.  It's time it made it to 
the top of the priority list.  Both the master server rename and the 
cross-platform migration.

   .../Ed

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