Service Guard and Veritas Netbackup.

[Kyaw Than]

We are in the process of implementing/moving a Veritas Netbackup server from a single server to a two node cluster, using MC/SG.

Details are:
HP-UX: 11i v1
MC/SG: version 11.16
Veritas Netbackup: version 5.1

The failover for the NetBackup software itself works quite well (there were a few gotchas); however, during our tests we have not been able to backup any of our Novell Netware clients.

Backups and restores have been successful with linux, hp-ux, and Windows clients, but not with Netware.

The problem appears to be due to Netware's inability to accept master server and media server parameters in the Netware config file for Netbackup. (To accomodate Netbackup in a SG environment, we had to add to the config file of the client to be backed up, not only the hostname of the Master server, but that of the nodes as well. ie: package hostname/ip as well as node names had to be added).

I realize this is more of a Veritas question than an MC/SG question; however Veritas does not officially support SG yet for a master server/media server configuration.

I have noticed that HP has something new called a SG Developers toolbox that mentions a Veritas Netbackup solution.

Does anybody out there have any experience with either Netware clients in a SG/Netbackup environment, or know more about the SG Developers toolbox wrt Netbackup ?

Thanks in advance,
Kyaw

[D Block 2]

Kyaw,

it sounds like it is only the Netware that is the issue.

are you also saying, you have 2 Master servers now ?

do the 2 HP-UX servers have each Netware client in the /etc/hosts file defined ?
this can cause some issues for netbackup Media servers if they can resolve the client's ip addres.

[Kyaw Than]

Hi Tom,

- Yes, netware is the issue. We just don't know how to resolve it.
- There is only 1 master server. However, it is not sufficient to just specify the Netbackup server package ip/hostname to the Netbackup clients; the cluster node names also have to be added (in this case, a 2 node cluster).
- we are using DNS. Hostname resolution is no different from our original Netbackup server.

I guess there aren't too many people doing Netware backups under this scenario.
kyaw

[D Block 2]

did you try to initiate a manual backup just on the Client Netware system ? This might work ? If it does, then it sounds like a networking issue on the server side..

did you turn on verbose logging on the server and examine the veritas openv log file ?

[Kyaw Than]

Hi Tom,

Yes we have tried looking at the logs. No difference doing it from the client either.

However, we did try again today and everything worked (go figure). We do have a separate netware group responsible for the Netware servers, so they might have carried out work we (unix group) are not aware of.

Thanks for your help. I will be closing this thread.

(I am still curious about what the SG Developers Toolkit will do for Veritas Netbackup, but that is for another day).

[Kyaw Than]

The issue has resolved itself after several attempts on our part. At the time of closing this thread, we have no indication yet why the error occurred in the first place (since we have not changed anything we do on the Netbackup software side.