NetBackup Issues

A list of issues encountered with various NetBackup versions:

Undocumented return codes

We had these fairly regularly with 4.5. Support said they are not possible.

Failed client install overwrites client on server

I've seen this happen twice, once with 3.4, once with 4.5. The first we believe was due to rsh/rcp failure, which resulted in a Solaris client being installed on the AIX server. Oops.

"hung" or slow restores

Idle tape drives, required tapes not busy, but restore doesn't start. No idea why. Restarting NetBackup on the Master seems to help.

Unbalanced vaulting processes

Images appear to be split between vaulting processes with no regard given to size. One process may complete after only 1 hour, leaving the other running for 10 hours.

multi-volume catalog backups can't be restored

This is improved in V5. This means that master servers do not scale well at all. I would suggest people wanting a timely DR to rsync the images directory within the NetBackup catalog to their DR system.

LTO drives must be defined as DLT

Small issue with 4.5, but confusing to new admins. Under version 5, LTO are configured as "hcart".

tape drive H/W or media problems

can abort client backups, and if multiplexing, multiple client backups. Also can abort vaulting (duplication).

vault preview.list contains ITC images

preview.list contains the list of images to duplicate when vaulting. However, it includes Inline Tape Copy (ITC) images, which don't actually get duplicated.

aborted vault leaves tapes in library

An aborted vault will leave the partially completed vault tapes in the library, and if a vault is re-run, images successfully duplicated from the first run are not re-processed (as expected), but the tapes from the first run are not ejected, either.

ovpass fails with dyntrk

The VERITAS Media Changer driver "ovpass" fails to work with "dyntrk" Dynamic Tracking enabled. This means hardware library modifications may require AIX rmt device reconfiguration.