Ask the Expert [Video]: How to Create Directives on NetWorker

@Roberto,

removing my post once again does not improve the terminology fault you state here.

Anyone can read the correct window title and verify the facts.

Please be correct. And be fair.

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Hi Roberto,

is this a new feature? - Directives are created from the NW Admin GUI which must be opened via NW NMC.

To avoid confusion, please do not set wrong expectations and use the correct terminology.

Thank you.

Hi bingo, I'm not sure you received the private message I sent to you Thursday. I requested that we take this discussion privately, hence I offered my email. I never received your email message, yet you insist on taking this publicly. I understand that this is your preference so I will respect it.

I appreciate your interest in helping us and the community to improve the quality of the content. Yesterday, based on your observations, we made edits to the title and description on this thread. If you still object the terminology being used, could you please provide details on your concern. We will be sure to once again take a look and revise if necessary.

Thanks,

Roberto

This Ask the Expert session is now open for questions. For the next couple of weeks our SMEs will be around to reply to your questions, comments or inquiries about our topic. Let's make this conversation useful, respectful and entertaining for all.

Cheers!

Is that human or computer voice in that video?

Let me kick off this with few question.  Imagine you are under UNIX/Linux.  You have following structure of file systems:

/

/data

/data/goo/gle

/home

/nsr

/opt

/usr

/var

I do have some data under /data/goo/foo/somewhere_below which I wish to skip, but not under /data/goo/gle/foo/somewhere below.

Questions:

1. is directive, when placed against << /data >> applicable only to that file system/partition or does it spawn onto /data/goo/gle too in case of "+action"? (like +skip: *.bzz)
2. how does directive act (or how does save act in combination to directive) if you have symlink which goes to some other place (like another partition or even same partition but where target location is not originally covered by initial directive range - for example, if I have directive for << /data/goo >> and under /data/goo/foo there us symlink to /data/bar - will skip action work or not?
3. I assume for special characters in terms of localization, one needs locale on both server (directive owner) and client (save owner) to be the same so they would understand each other?

Hi Roberto,

unfortunately I did not receive any mail - I just noticed that my comment has been deleted. But I also noticed the corrections you made.

Please understand that it is just my intention to just name the details correctly ... especially as an ex NW instructor I am keeping an eye on this issues. I just want to make sure that all the people speak the same proper language. It surely improves understanding an especially helps novices.

Hi Hrvoje,

Thank you for starting the conversation.

1. Yes Directive applicable to /Data directory. But when you specify "+action", all child directories will inherit the directive.

Since /data/goo/gle is a mount point, it should be added separately under directive to take effect.

2. Directive wont span across symlinks. Target directory path should be added in the directive to work.

3. I haven't worked on non English language directive yet. I will research on this and get back to you.

Regards,

Prajith

Hi Prajith,

sorry to correct you - it should read as follows:

"Directives are resources that contains special instructions that control how the NetWorker client software processes files and directories during backup and recovery. ..."

Directives are "specific rules for uasm" and consequently ... like 'save' & 'recover' a client specific program.

Here is an overview of NetWorker Directive,

Directives are resources that contains special instructions that control how the NetWorker server processes files and directories during backup and recovery. NetWorker administrators can create directives to customize the NetWorker software to your specific needs, maximize the efficiency of backups, and apply special handling to individual files or directories.

Hi Hrvoje,

I agree, you are absolutely right. I will start posting some examples and advanced options of directives here. That might be useful for wide audience.

Example which you have mentioned is very much useful. We always tend to use C:\, D:\ etc specifically for windows clients. Mostly we modify existing directives readily available in NetWorker, rather than building new one.

Please post more similar advanced options here, it will be good candidate for discussion.

Regards,

Prajith

I'm not sure if this is still applicable to current code, but in old days, with dense file/folder structure, save/uasm walk was spending some time on checking if there is client side directive (nsr.dir on Windows and .nsr on UNIX/Linux).  If such directives were not your thing, and they can cause some issues if you forget about them, then placing ignore as part of standard directive for all (or most) of your clients could cause some performance gains.  That was in old days of NW5 and maybe 6 - since then code and box performance overall have changed (increased) so I do not have any benchmarks whether this is applicable nowadays.

Hi Prajith and Roberto,

I think you won't see many questions here since directives are rather basic and people tend to use them for basic functions so there might be nothing to ask from their point of view, but perhaps you could share some hints how to make them more spicy and juicy.

For example, it is still not known by major community that if you use << "/" >> on Windows client, this covers all save sets. Or that you can use some posix rules to shape what you skip (like +skip: [tT][mM][pP] ) and similar.

Hi Hrvoje Crvelin

I agree with you and I'm glad you're bringing up new areas to cover based on this topic. ATE [Video] is a new approach we're taking on ECN. We thought that knowledgeable people like you would like to chime in and provide their thoughts on what we present at the support videos we regularly seed to YouTube. Most videos we upload to YouTube are based on demos, how-to's or some type of training, but usually these are put together from our perspective. We understand that there is a large diversity of perspectives on ECN so by presenting them on this format we hope the audience would share their own way of doing things or at least let us know what else they'd be interested in learning.

BTW, let me know when you're ready to be the host of your own ATE event. I think our community would be thrilled to have you share your perspective of things. Let me know.

Thanks,

Roberto

Hi RobertoAraujo,

I'm involved with EMC at some other level of social/customer relationship and in that forum I already expressed my feelings about ATE (which is not necessary ATE [Video]).  I said that EMC should look at their support cases and based on common topic dominating there create ATE sessions to make things more clear for the customers.  At the same time you also get feedback why certain topic might be poorly understood or accepted.  For example, I have noticed that people using vmware snapshots have issues with snapshots not removed, but I haven't seen anyone saying that this happens due to wrong vCenter sizing nor that NW9 does offer some fixes in that area (fix in terms that it makes life easier even if you miss the sizing). NW9 has been released with pretty much everything changes so you could do numerous ATEs there.  And coming backup to ATE [video], I think that is great because I feel more confident that my cooking in kitchen will be less of a failure if I follow recipe on Youtube than if I read from some book.  The key ingredient here is to make sure that you not just cover basics, but basics+ (so you do not have to enter into area which potentially might kill professional services or any other kind of advanced support service).  And since EMC has this wonderful vLABs, creating those should not be an issue (actually, vLABs are something that if documented would be better than any documentation on the same topic).

As for me, I tend to give my input whenever I can contribute on forums I follow so these communities are kind of social ATEs for everyone who already participates, but the one coming from you is seen differently.  It is seen as something coming from vendor and you expect to see extra mile there.

That's great feedback Hrvoje Crvelin and how funny, someone must have heard you because we're currently on talks for working on a similar approach of taking a look at the top support cases to turn them to ATE discussion.

I appreciate all you've shared and hope to continue to provide quality events, content and replies to your concerns.

Cheers!