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Media clientid db, internal client table, how to treat DNS changes
Are there some utilities that would allow to display and modify the client table from the media database? I just got a client that gets removed all Client File Indices once upon a time (I guess when nsrim or some kind of nsrck is run); there was a mistake with a domain and IP address and I guess there is something strange going inside networker - I had clients that were being saved to wrong CFI directory (probably even with a wrong clientid), after some deleting/creating new client. After restarting networker it got fixed, unfortunately we couldn't merge the old indices back and, honestly, I didn't want to scan 100 VTL tapes. I would need to show the content of the client/clientid table, possibly do some changes.
Our customer has quite a large network and the DNS is not always 100% correct; also some changes are taking place there. We sometimes encounter following situations which I am not quite sure how to handle:
1) sometimes 2 DNS names point to one IP address; I think networker actually allows you to create 2 such clients with different names. What happens to indices in such case?
2) The customer sometimes deletes a client (even from DNS). What would you do to retain the backups in NetWorker for a while? mminfo seems to complain about not being able to resolve the name.
What are the recommended procedures when something like this happens?
ondrejpalkovsky
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February 27th, 2013 04:00
Yes, the clientids are in there as well. You have to open it in Hex editor. The format of the record is basically (I think it somehow depends on the version of NW though) - everything is Big endian:
The file is a sequence of records.
First 16 bytes of every record is a 'record header'. First 4 bytes contain size of the record (something, the size is usually bytes 4bytes & 0xffff).
Next 20 bytes is ClientID without first 4 bytes (which is probably some checksum - that was the question of this thread).
Next 4 bytes indicate length of the name of the client.
Next we get 4-bytes padded name of client.
dvillanu
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February 27th, 2013 07:00
The client ID for old (deleted) clients does stay on the media database table forever. One way is to create the client with the FQDN and lookup what client ID is assigned. Another way to find the client ID is to use a tool called mdbtest.
ble1
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February 27th, 2013 08:00
I know engineering used mdbtest in some cases, but I never got into the situation that it has to be used so I never had chance to grab it.