Wilkinson, Alex wrote, in part,  on 5/3/2006 9:01 AM:
> ... The Manual is crap ! ...
>   

Well, kind of a harsh characterization.  There is a lot of 
documentation.  And keep in mind that it must describe a product that 
has roots in the stone ages and is otherwise as counter-intuitive to use 
as anything I've seen.   However, I am particularly fond of passages 
that refer you to another manual for more information ... when no more 
information exists.

(the following has nothing to do with authenticated access to the Admin 
Console)

My most recent escapade in these areas has been to try to understand how 
to do a True Image Restore (v5.1).  The manuals offer obtuse 
information, while the GUI program provides a hard-to-use interface, 
that, in my experience, yields restores that either don't have the 
expected results or appear to be impossible to specify.  Just last week, 
2 of my users tried to do various True Image Restores.  In each case, a 
full and an incremental would have to be used to accomplish the 
mission.  In one case, only the incremental was restored, in another 
only the full, and in another, both, but not a True Image restore.  It's 
just hard to use.  I did find a note at the support site (267173) that 
is a pretty good explanation of TIR.  It basically said for TIR, you o 2 
restores, one for full, then a second for incremental.  That fit what 
I'd seen from my two users, but then one of my users managed what 
appears to be a True Image restore in just one step using the command 
line menu program "bp".

However, I don't know if that was to be a good restore, since in the 
middle of the restore of the "full backup"  we needed to halt the 
process. The NetBackup Admin Console "offered" a suspend" and so we took 
it.  However, when we resumed the restore job, the "full backup" restore 
step failed to resume successfully.  this was followed by a successful 
incremental restore and a restore job status code of 1 (some files not 
restored).  It's just hard to use.  How to "complete" the True Image 
restore?  I have no idea besides cleaning out the directories and trying 
the whole thing again.  It's just hard to use.  

My idea of a good "true image" restore is one where I specify a date and 
maybe whether NetBackup is to leave or discard newer files ... and 
NetBackup restores the directory to the exact state found at the backup.  

cheers, wayne