I have received questions from a couple of people about backing up
clusters using netbackup.  Since there has been more than one
question, I am posting the following example to the list.  There is
also a question of mine at the end.

Here is how I have configured netbackup for physical and logical hosts
in a cluster.

Consider a cluster with two physical hosts called real1 and real2.
This cluster has one service which can fail back and forth.  The
hostname for the cluster service is log1, for the logical host.  The
shared cluster data is one filesystem, which is mounted as /cluster on
whichever host has the service.

I have configured three clients on the netbackup server: real1, real2,
and log1.  For log1 the file list would be /cluster.  For real1 and
real2 the file list would be /, /usr, and other local disks.  Real1
and real2 could be in the same class.

In my testing, netbackup has been completely happy with the above
arrangement.  When it backs up log1 as a netbackup client, it does not
care which host it is really connecting to.  If the cluster is working
correctly, it will always find /cluster available from whichever host
answered as log1.

As far as I can tell, netbackup does not care what client name is
listed in the bp.conf on the clients.  From what I have seen, things
work fine if the client name on the master does not match the client's
bp.conf.  The master stores the images under the name it is using to
run the backup.

I would be interested to hear more details about how the client name
in bp.conf is used or whether there is a "correct" setting for it in
configurations like the one described.

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Jonathan Meyer
(781)398-6594
UNIX Systems Administrator
Paramtric Technology Corporation
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