Re: [Veritas-bu] Has anyone run a database consistency check recently?

Yes, many times. This was a huge exposure for us at the time. The issue was that we couldn't run a consistency check on our own, mainly due to the size of our catalog. We were relegated, as you are, to sending Symantec dumps of the catalog/databases, opening up a case and waiting for them to produce a report.

The critical problem with that, is that by the time we actually got the report and acted on it, the next backup run was in flight, making the report largely obsolete because the catalog/databases were now being written to again. Typically, it took a few days to clear up our inconsistencies. Also, typically, we ran this bi-weekly to keep this problem in check.

This has been a serious issue with NBU for years. Because the possibility exists, as you have found out, that NBU could mark media with live images on it as scratch media, customers are always subject to losing data. Symantec knows this.

At least in our environment, we, nor Symantec we never able to determine what we could do to keep these inconsistencies from occurring in the first place.

At the time, the utility that Symantec used to determine inconsistencies was kept from customers. It was/is called NBCC. My understanding is that it may be available to end users now, but for a long time, customers were, in essence, unable to help themselves in this regard.

So, yes, I am suggesting that inherently, NBU *is* subject to data loss, silently and at any time, due to the fact that their catalog/databases cannot remain consistent.

===================================

   Steven L. Sesar
   Lead Operating Systems Programmer/Analyst
   UNIX Application Services R101
   The MITRE Corporation
   202 Burlington Road - MS K101
   Bedford, MA 01730
   tel: (781) 271-7702
   fax: (781) 271-2600
   mobile: (617) 519-8933
   email: ssesar AT mitre DOT org

===================================

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu on behalf of Ian.Fehring AT nab.com DOT au
Sent: Fri 8/24/2007 12:04 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Has anyone run a database consistency check recently?

Hi all,
We have been having issues with our catalog (running NBU 6.0 MP4) and have
found that our catalog is very inconsistent. We have been running a
utility from Symantec called consistency_gather.pl, which basically grabs
image, media and vol DB information. We send that through to Symantec to
produce a report, which we receive back.
We have two NetBackup 6.0 environment, and both are reporting that we have
inconsistencies in our catalog.
Has anyone else run this utility and obtained a report from Symantec.
In one of our report, it stats that of the 375000 images that we have,
about 4700 of them could be lost due to being overwritten. We also have
multiple tapes that appear to be assigned to multiple media servers, and
the list goes on.
Anyone else run into this type of issue?
Regards
Ian.

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