Greeetings,

At my work we use several AFS file servers for storage. We have been using 
netbackup to backup and restore these servers for many years. They are 
all running on Solaris 10 on SPARC hardware.

We would love it if it would be possible to switch to using Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux for these AFS servers. The SPARC stuff is just too 
expensive. And their is the uncertanty about Oracle's takover. I do 
actually use RHEL 5 to run some AFS servers that don't need to be backup 
up...

When I last tried setting up a server and doing a backup/ restore with a 
test AFS file server running under RHEL 5, it did not work. Restores from 
a backup done on a SPARC system worked on Linux. But a backup would not 
work. Instead of backing up the /vicepa patition volumes it tried to 
backup all the actual files on the /vicepa partition. On our Solaris and 
Linux AFS fileservers we are using namei type AFS fileservers.

The files have names like:

/vicepa/AFSIDat/R1/R5y0U/+/+/0++++6

these files contain the actual data that is used by the AFS volumes. It 
shouldn't be backing those up. Instead it should be doing a "vos dump" 
command to copy the .backup volume.

The backup selection in the client is:

/vicep[a-z]

I was wondering how I could go about reporting this bug? Any chance it 
could ever be fixed? I have been told netbackup does and doesn't 
support AFS fileservers any longer... I'd hate to have to cobble together 
our own backup solution when netbackup has been working so well all these 
years.

The versions of netbackup client I tried were:

netbackup 5.1, 7M.

netbackup 6.0, 4M.

netbackup 6.5.3.1.

The version of afs we are using on our servers is 1.4.11.

I was told by a Linux sysadmin I know that this used to work with RHEL 3. 
But he didn't provide any further details such as the version of 
netbackup client it used to work with.

Another group has taken over our backups and soon I will not have access 
to a tape robot any more or a netbackup server. After that I will only 
have access to the clients. As for the group taking over our backups 
their blanket answers are: "AFS + netbackup will only be supported and 
work on solaris 8" which is rubbish since I have many Solaris 10 systems 
and it works just fine. Solaris 8 was end of lifed so I know using it 
forever is not a realistic answer either. Our Sun hardware is out of 
warranty and getting older every day.

I know a lot of other services have moved away from UNIX to Linux over the 
years so it should be possible for this last one of our dependencies to 
get fixed if symantec still supports afs. Thats the big "if" I guess.

I tried asking about this topic on the openAFS mailing lists but was told 
symantec didn't care about AFS support on Linux and that we should cobble 
together our own solution. I fear this is not an option and that 
in the end taxpayers dolars will be wasted on expensive Sun hardware if 
this is the only asnwer. We also can't dich AFS yet.

Thanks for any ideas anyone might have.

Gary Gatling      | ITECS Systems
ITECS, BOX 7901   | Operations and Systems Analyst
NCSU, Raleigh, NC | Email: gsgatlin AT eos.ncsu DOT edu
27695-7901        | Phone: (919) 513-4572 (5C Page Hall)
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