Re: [Veritas-bu] ZFS Filesystem Backups

Ed,

As Phil and myself have proved, there are backup admins out there who have no idea that their ZFS filesystem data is unprotected. Not everyone has the opportunity to test restores and it’s only through sheer luck that we’d been given a server to use as a test box about a week before I made my discovery.

I agree 100% that as a matter of urgency, Symantec should have distributed the technote much earlier than they did once they identified this issue. I hope that there were not too many other admins who had to go through the same stages of disbelief that we did when faced with backups that never errored out but also didn’t actually back up any data !!

The potential levels of exposure for NBU customers worldwide is mind boggling and really shouldn’t have ever happened.

I am just thankful that some of the Symantec engineering team also subscribe to this mailing list and that they were able to make a fix available so quickly.

Mark Glazerman

Desk: 314-889-8282

Cell: 618-520-3401

P please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to

From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu [mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Ed Wilts
Sent: Friday, August 08, 2008 6:49 AM
To: Weber, Philip
Cc: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] ZFS Filesystem Backups - Tips and tricks

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 3:16 AM, Weber, Philip <Philip.Weber AT egg DOT com> wrote:

Thanks for highlighting this problem to the list, as we for one hadn't
even picked up that our zfs filesystems were no longer backing up. We
now have the engineering binaries, and our account manager at Symantec
has kindly chased up the TechAlert which should have been issued.

I had a meeting earlier this week with NetBackup engineers followed by some managers. I raised the issue of technotes being released "too late" and used this as an example. The fix is already in 6.5.2 which has been out for a couple of months. In my opinion, the technote should have been released when the bug was acknowledged by engineering - not a couple of months after the fix is out. Symantec gave customers like you no warning that NetBackup was silently failing to back up data when your policies were configured correctly. They knew your data was not being backed up. They knew that unless you went out and manually verified each mount point that there was no way for you to know that the data was no longer being backed up. They chose not to tell you. That's simply irresponsible.

They heard my message. Whether or not they act on it is now up to them. You may want to ask your account manager to suggest to product management that these technotes be issued in a more timely fashion - the more pressure on them, the better. I suspect that there's a few political battles to be fought internally over this....

.../Ed

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