Further Good Links/Tools

In a previous post, I described some tools that I had found useful for documenting the system environment.

A pretty comprehensive system description of many versions of the Windows OS can be generated by SIW - Systems Information for Windows, which was written by Gabriel Topala. It is only free for personal use. The pricing model for Businesses is in the right sort of ball park.

If you are a Legato Networker user and you need to generate reports for either your own benefit or the benefit of others, then the Networker Reporting Utility is well worth a look.The download mechanism is rather painful, but it is worthwhile. There is a product from Legato which does a similar job, but for our environment we were looking at having to spend upwards of £30,000 to £40,000! That decision was pretty much a no-brainer!

And that's that for now!

Legato Networker Configuration Duplication

I made a mistake whilst installing Legato Networker on a Solaris 10 box. The mistake prevented the backup server from backing up the Solaris 10 client.

I support multiple DNS domains and the backup server appears in many of those domains and as the backupserver is multihomed it appears in those domains with different IP addresses.

The Solaris 10 client was in Domain dom1.example.com, one of the few sub-domains the backup server actually isn't in!

When I installed NetWorker I specificed that the backupserver as backupserver.dom2.example.com. The backupserver was actually trying to communicate with the Solaris 10 client over the network where it was known as backupserver.dom3.example.com.

Networker didn't like the loop effect of this arrangement and the backup was failing.

In fact I should have just specified a simple server name, unqualified by a domain name and added the backupserver into hosts file.

D'Oh!

However, it took a little longer to resolve than I had expected because Networker not only records the backup server in the /nsr/res/servers file but also records it several times in the /nsr/res/nsrla.res file.

As I said above, I would have saved myself some confusion by entering the unqualified name of the backup server upon installation.