Q & A

Every year we hold a NetBackup customer forum at one of our main engineering sites. One of my favorite sessions is the "Ask the Expert" panel. They put 15-20 engineers in the front of the room (often wearing odd hats) and customers get to ask any question they want and watch us squirm. When I was in engineering I used to get to sit in on the panel. Now that I spend more time in PowerPoint and less in real code, I fear my expert rating may be downgraded to audience participation only. To prove I can still answer a question or two, here are some examples of the random questions which went through my inbox recently.

1. 1. How do I configure 400 drives in a single library using my VTL?
2. 2. How do I get a list of which clients are running which version of software?
3. 3. Where is the MIB file for NetBackup Operations manager alerts?

Here are my answers.

1. 1. In 6.5.2 you are able to configure an unlimited number of drives for three robot types; ACS, TS8, TLD and each media server can accommodate up to 127 drives. There are some reasons why you might not want to configure 400 drives in one virtual library. For instance, it would be a rare media server that can actually drive 127 tape drives, virtual or real, at the rated speed.
2. 2. I’m a command line kind of guy, so here is my answer.

       >./bpplclients -allunique -noheader | cut -d " " -f3 | xargs -i csh -c "echo -n {}:;./bpgetconfig -g {} -l | cut -d \";\" -f3"

   This was tested with Linux. You may have to adjust the arguments to 'cut' depending on your shell. The Windows solution to the same command line problem is an exercise left to the reader.

   NetBackup has a rich set of command line options. Using a few pipes and basic unix command lines I took the output from two separate commands and combined them. This kind of command line flexibility allows our customers to create some great solutions. Check out this paper on how to snapshot ZFS filesystems and backup with NetBackup as an example of using NetBackup commands to get a job done.

3. 3. The MIB file are installed with NetBackup Operations Manager(NOM). Optionally, you can download them in one of the following technotes.
   • HP OpenView and NOM
   • Microsoft MOM and NOM