Hello everyone

 

Today I encountered quite a strange behavior in NetBackup (6.5.3.1). For a couple of months we now use SLES10 linux server as media servers in our company and recently we also bought a couple of VTLs. When I started testing the VTLs with our linux machines I quickly got to understand that linux (out of the box SLES10SP2) has a limit of tape devices of 128. But since we would like to use more than that on our media server (the VTLs can offer up to 240 drives per partition) we let our linux engineering guys modify the kernel settings so that we can generate up to 1024 tape devices on the servers.

Now, everything went fine and I got 200 tape devices on my linux server (100 drives from 2 different VTLs). But now NetBackup seems to have a problem with it: Every time I start NBU the entire media management demons stop working after a couple of seconds and the only one that stays running is ‘vmd’. After hours of googleing, searching through the logfiles I finally saw the following line in ‘/var/log/messages’ when I ran ‘ltid’ with the ‘-v’-option:

 

ltid[4709]: The currently licensed version allows up to 128 drives per server.  You have configured 200 drives.

What exactly does it mean? What license? Is there a license for this at all or is it just Symantec’s way of telling me that I should not tamper with the standard linux kernels?

 

Anyone got an idea how to get rid of this limitation?

Any help appreciated!

 

 

Cheers

Peter