I mentioned last week that I was interested in moving my Networker
server from Solaris to Linux. I've done a little research on this, and
thought I'd share my testing/observations with the list.
I poked around Legato's site and the knowledgebase looking for technical
bulletin on this, and didn't find anything. I called support and found
Legato doesn't support moving a server between platforms. I can
understand where moving from NT to unix might be problematic, but Sun to
Linux should be pretty straight-forward. Their "cop out" was that
Legato does not support how different file systems (ufs vs ext3) would
support the different data. The tech admitted that many customers do
migrate from Sun to Linux, but again reminded me it wasn't supported.
So, I tried it. My Linux box was Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced
Server 3. I gave it the same name/ip as the production server, but
never connected it to the network. I installed Networker Server 7.1.2
(the same version as the production Sun server,) from the media kit. I
did a bootstrap backup on the production server, moved a tape drive over
to the testbed server, and followed the disaster recovery documentation.
Everything came up fine. /usr/ucb/logger and /usr/ucb/mail didn't exist
in RedHat, so I made symlinks. Other than that, Networker seemed to
come up just fine. My index restores and other restores seemed to work
just fine off the evaluation server. (Licensing note: since the hostid
changed, all of the activation codes are invalid - but it gave me a two
week grace period. That's plenty of time for me to do my testing, and I
can always delete the server and recreate it from another bootstrap if I
want continued testing. The Legato tech advised I could also use the
activation codes in the media kit to get another 45 (?) days.) I only
did a few index restores, but everything seems to be working fine.
So, the migration from Sun to Linux seemed to go well. I'm having
problems with the next step - renaming the Linux server. There are tech
bulletins on renaming, as they're recent as of 2003, but they didn't
address the issue I'm having.
Today, I decided to rename the machine and connect it to the network for
more testing. I changed its hostname and IP address, brought it online,
and brought up Networker. It came up, but I needed to copy the index
from the old name to the new one to browse the previous backups. Things
were going well until I tried to do another index restore.
# nsrck -L7 faust
nsrck: checking index for 'faust'
nsrck: The file index for client 'faust' will be recovered.
nsrck: The index recovery for 'faust' failed.
nsrck: File index error: can't find index backups for 'faust' on server
'new_server_name'
I couldn't do an index restore, but I could browse the backups server
index with nwrecover and see the old directory hierarchy, etc. If I
took the server off the network, renamed it to the old_server_name, and
brought the system and networker back online, nsrck -L7 worked. The
only thing I can figure is the server name is tied into the index
backups (that would be consistent with what I see in the saveset
reports.) However, if the server gets renamed, how do you access those
old index backups? I didn't see any way to specify a server name in
nsrck.
I suppose that I could do all the index restores while the new server
was offline with the old name, and then rename it. However, I
occasionally need to restore an old index for recovery purposes. How do
I do this when the server has a different name? Has anyone else seen
this gotcha?
Dave
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