Do you CLI ? Would you prefer not to...

Good morning. In 7.6 we added a Find capability to NMC. It will allow you to find items in tables. It is not a filtering mechanism yet but it will help you locate things faster. Check it out, I think it will help you in your day-to-day operations.

Some interesting features of find.

1. It can search across multiple tables. For example the new monitoring layout contains a number of panels. Find can locate all occurrences of given string

2. It has a Sort-selected function that groups everything it finds and then auto-scrolls them into view. This is particularly helpful when you find a lot of entries in a table but several of them are not in view.

Here some screen shots to get you started.

Show/Hide Find panel

Highlight All

Sort Selected

Hi Skip,

Another thought and area that i seem to find myself having to do regular scripts for, are the painful users who two days after a backup say - lets keep that for much longer than initially specified.

In our environment where all tapes are stored in specific retention pools, and there is a distinct lack of spending (and even space in the library), we need to make sure that all of our tapes rotate when we want them to.

Thus we have to spend lots of effort scripting - mminfo's to find the particular savesets to change browse/retention periods for - plug those into nsrmm.

Oh and then just to add to the fun, plug the same ssid's into nsrstage to put them into a more appropriate pool.  OK staging from tape to tape doesn't clear the initial saveset from the first tape, but at least it means that the first tape will expire when I expect it to, so I can reuse it shortly afterwards.

Easyish for some of us to script, and script it has to be - I can't imagine being able to put that into a gui.

Oh yes, and lots of communication back to the user in question to tell them to let us know about it in advance of the backup, as the change would take only a couple of minutes using the gui.

Felix

hi guys

any cheat sheet for commonly used commands

Hi Thierry,

Yes, there is a command reference guide.  Do you have access to Powerlink?  It is located here.

I hope this helps.

Allan

Hi Therry,

In this area I'd politely term the EMC command reference guide as "concise"!

I've just downloaded and flicked through a rather more comprehensive guide to nsradmin (your main tool for automation) from here: (you need to provide an e-mail address)

http://nsrd.info/micromanuals.html

It seems to have a good run through of all the features and should give you a strong leg-up to being productive with your scripts.

Happy scripting.

Will

CLI is more or less mandatory to see correlations between for instance which tapedrives belong to which pool. Yes, you can see in every pool which tapedrive belongs to it in the GUI, but stumbling though a large number of pools to find out if drives from multiple systems are correctly assigned to the correct pools is much easier scripted. One of things I use it for is when deleting a jukebox device, to be sure I already removed it from all the pools it is assigned to. NW always only reported one of the pools it was assigned to, but not all. If you had to use GUI only, it would be cumbersome deleting dozens of devices for dozens of systems in a migration from one large library type to another (this environment is so large, and also uses much tapedrive sharing that we even reached the limit of 512 defined devices in the middle of the migration).

what would be helpfull indeed is to be able to create your own queries using NSR types and their values, being able to cross reference them to other NSR types/values. You know, like a real database (what pools does this drive belong to?, show me clients that are not in any of the index backups only savegroups?) And what's up with nsradmin that it shows entries when a wildcard did not find any hits? A big no-no in the real world of regular expressions.

And CLI does not mean that scripting capabilities was at the base of the conception of the CLI. scripting the creation of a jukebox using jbconfig comes to mind. We've build a script in the past that could do that with jbconfig under NW6 using multiple input files thus being able to create a jukebox with dozens of drives shared by dozens of systems. Its so easy for support or manuals to say "delete and recreate jukebox" but the practice is always much more complicated in envs with hundreds of defined tapedrives and dozens of pools. This specific item has been changed ofcourse in NW7 with a much more powerfull jbedit. Was just to make a point.

in addition of being able to do everything with CLI, it would also be helpfull to determine myself what the defaults should be that currently are hardcoded into NW. FSC/Fujitsu Networker has something in place for that with /nsr/res/defaults which allows certain variables to be set in a config file instead of doing that in the NW startup script. Don't know what else it can all set, but for EMC NW it would be great to be able to define your own defaults for for example client parallelism, blocksize 256 and CDI disabled for all tapedrives being created, instead of always having to change that in the gui. That's why people always fall back to CLI when they have to create many entries, being able to set/correct the right value.

I'm curious how anyone currently would prevent any backups from being started with GUI only. Disable all savegroups one at a time. with a script that's done in a few secs. And yes, I'm all for a GUI option to be able to suspend ALL backup activitity or that service mode of a tapedrive (or jukebox) is service mode as it used to be in the past, that I as admin can still load a tape into a drive and actually test it. But I'm drifting of now...