NMC - What drives you crazy ?

Here is something I've been experiencing for quite some time that just drives me nuts.  On my laptop the NMC will periodically just hang with the following message:

I can wait and wait and wait, the only way to resolve the issues is to task manager > end task.  I can't repeat the this issue either, it just happens when it happens.

EDIT: I am running 7.5.1 build 269.

All,

  Hello again. So while reading through all of the responses it seems that performance is a major issue.

Now ignoring under powered machines, can you tell me what you were doing when these issues occured ?

   I know a lot of these things seem random but if you have specific activities that are causing peformance

problems it would help me focus my conversation with my engineering brothers.

  Thanks again for the feedback and keep it coming.

Thanks,

Skip

Just thought that there are a few of things (that I can think of immediately) that really bug us here.

I have to admit that I don't think that any of them have already been mentioned. But perhaps it is because of our clever environment...

I'll start by saying that we are running 3 NetWorker servers on AIX 5.3, each server running v7.4.5-1. Our NMC server runs on a separate Solaris 10 server, co-habiting with AlphaStor. The version of NMC that we are running is 7.5.1, build 323.  We see no reason why the version of NMC shouldn't be at the highest available version as we are running on a separate host, as long as the NetWorker client version for the NMC server is accepted to be backed up by the earlier versioned NetWorker server.

We have all of our tape drives under our environment controlled and managed through AlphaStor.

Thus all of the tape drives shown in NMC are logical tape drives, which need to be added and removed through jbedit. Not fun, but fairly easy once you work out how.

Now the bug bear we have is that under the Devices tag under the Devices window, if one our less well trained ops tries to be clever and "Scans for Devices" then lots of irrelevant devices are created. Apart from hacking the res database is there anyway of getting rid of these useless devices?

The second thing that really bugs me is the sort order - I know that his has already been mentioned, but when you sort your list - yes it does work sorting one column and then a 2nd, and make a configuration change, the nicely sorted list gets messed up. So we have to re-sort the list to see what we are looking for.

Why does the sort order within the lists change when an individual item is updated?

And finally, we still have an old server floating around running 7.1.3. Most of my support staff (ops) and even my development staff (myself included) still connect to this server every day to start nwadmin!  This is because the nwadmin gui enables me to check the overall health of my busy servers within 3 seconds. Using NMC still means I need to change windows - as mentioned before this is seldomly the quickest of tasks.  On the positive side, using nwadmin gives us the clue as to where the issues might be, and then NMC is used to delve deeper into the problem.

Oh yes, there is another one. Co-habiting NMC and DPA is a pain if you do not want the DPA server to use the iAnyWhere database that NMC uses. However we have found that co-habiting NMC and DPA is not really practical as they are both too cpu intensive. So I'll just mention it in passing.

Just wanted to add a wish, but the lack of the function might drive me(and collegues) crazy.

Search capabilites on attributes/clientnames/volumes. Give us a search tool that save us from scrolling up and down the client list for example.

Maybe a searchline on the frame to have a quick way of filtering/serch a resource.

Regards/Håkan

As Felix just mentioned, you can see the new search capabilities at around 5:30 of this video.

Allan

Hakan,

  Good morning. In 7.6 we added a Find feature that will allow you to locate items in any table. This feature

will also allow you to find all items and to sort on those items. The sort feature works in conjunction with

find all. Because you may have many items spread out through your tables, the sort feature moves all of

items you found to the top of the tables so you know exactly were they are (less scrolling). Oh and did I

mention this works across multiple tables as well...I think you are going to like it.

Cheers,

Skip Hanson

NetWorker Usability

usability_networker@emc.com

Skip,

I've just run the 7.6 UI demo.

I like what I see, and look forward to getting time to test it out. Although I don't know how soon that will be.

Am very pleased to see the nwadmin similarities in there, and I have to admit that the demo suggests that this will be better than the old one!!!

Will have to wait and see what other benefits this may give, whether it resolves my other bug bears is another question.

Felix

Excellent, I hope you enjoy them !...after all, you (our customers) made it happen. Keep those

requests and comments coming.

My biggest problem with NMC is that is crashes when multiple user log onto it.  We use 7.4SP5 landscape and only NMC is 7.5SP1 as we wanted to implement LDAP auth.  We noticed that even when all is idle if multiple user log to NMC it will result in gstd crash.  And there is nothing in log so you can't even grab onto something.

Second thing is that in details of group you may see details of another group, GUI not being refreshed, etc, but this could due to java as well so if I just clone the window and call it again I get my refresh.

Larry,

I'm quite sure that might drive you crazy, but has nothing to do with NMC, right?

Can we run NMC version 7.6 to manage our NetWorker 7.5.1 servers and get all the new features of NMC 7.6?

Skip might know this better, but based on past experience I'm quite sure that is going to be possible.  You should miss only those feature which are new to NetWorker core, while those built into NMC should be there.  I run currently something like that where I use 7.4.5 servers and NMC 7.5.1. 

While on subject of NMC, question for Skip... do you know if there has been ever RFE filled to have NMC feature grouping groups into folders?  That means, when I open NMC, I could create custom folders in configuration view and group my backup groups inside... eg. folder called PowerSnap, SAP, Oracle, archive, NDMP, etc.  (or production, development, test, acceptance, etc).  Nice bonus would be notifications based on such folder view as well.  I ask this as we have rather growing environment and I can't fit all groups on screen even when using some resolution which may drive you blind   Grouping groups into folders based on criteria I find fit would help me in my work.