Veritas NetBackup
Getting started with NetBackup.
Yesterday we discovered that the AMANDA dumps on ROJ were really not working well at all, so I went on a crash install of Veritas on the new backup server. I’ve put clients on PAX, ASHTI, and SITH so far, and I did a trial backup of /home/ldap on ASHTI last night. Nothing there at that time, so it didn’t prove much. I set the policies to have /home/db and /home/webdb on SITH backed up starting at 8 this morning, and it kicked off and finished with what looks like a happy ending. Also in the mix were most of the /home partitions on PAX, and again /home/ldap on ASHTI. PAX is currently working on /home/groups, after having done /home/classes. I won’t really know how it all goes until the whole backup finishes or fails, and hopefully that’ll work ok.
Things to note so far:
- There’s a bunch of good scripts at www.storagemountain.com (as usual, a good place). I’ve put Curtis Preston’s (as suggested) into /usr/openv/local.
- NetBackup uses a MySQL database as a backend…
- Currently I have the Overland library attached to the main external SCSI bus and not the PCI card. While the PROM saw everything attached to the card, Solaris didn’t. It happily saw everything when attached to the built in bus.
- Use the st and sg drivers. Let Veritas handle configuration of the sg.conf file. We can handle configuration of the st.conf file.
- NetBackup has a funny concept of the files to include in a backup schedule. In particular, it doesn’t have a way of associating a file (list) with a server. So you end up having to arrange your servers’ filesystems such that the data you want put into a particular schedule is going to be found in a certain place. We already do that to a certain extent, so it’s ok. THis also means, though, that if on ASHTI, I only back up /home/ldap with this policy, I get a number of failed reports for /home/classes and /home/groups, etc. which only exist on PAX. The job as a whole doesn’t fail, since it succeeds if any of the things in the file list succeed, but it’s a slightly different way of thinking about things.
- We need some concurrency/multiplexing tuning. Right now we’re writing one job at a time to tape, and I don’t think this is either necessary or a good use of time. It’ll work for this weekend, but hopefully I’ve set the concurrency and multiplexing stuff for future jobs such that up to 4 jobs can be streamed to tape at once. Must go back and re-read that section of the manual, since it made sense a month or two ago when I first read it…
- The Java GUI interface is surprisingly useful. The CLI interface is surprisingly well synced with the GUI, but has little to no doco. Will need to read up on that where I can.
Posted by Rowan Littell at November 8, 2003 10:16 AM