Unlock the secrets of Dell NetWorker with our comprehensive guide on troubleshooting process crashes and core dumps. This video provides IT professionals with a step-by-step approach to gather information about the problem and the environment, understand supportability, and implement best practices. We’ll also introduce you to the nsrget and pkgcore tools, essential for any IT professional working with Dell NetWorker. Join us to enhance your skills and become a Dell NetWorker troubleshooting expert. E-Lab Knowledge Base Article #19677 NetWorker-Tools: For more Information, check our Knowledge Base click here.
Let’s discuss process crashes and core dumps in context of NetWorker and how to troubleshoot them. The first thing to do is look at the operating system and see how core dumps are being managed from an operating system level. On Linux you’re going to use the ulimit command as shown here.
The ulimit -c will set the core dump property at the kernel level for the Linux operating system. You can set this on the running system using ulimit -C unlimited and then inside in the limits.conf file you can set this permanently so that the change survives a reboot. It’s important to set this on a permanent basis so that whenever a core dump is generated by an application the Linux operating system will then put this core dump file somewhere where we can then analyze it from a support perspective to see what has caused the crash in the system.
This is in /etc/security/limits.conf and you just need to uncomment the line where you have soft core and 0 and put this to unlimited. For a Windows system it will depend on what version exactly you have of a Windows Server technology so you’ll need to check in the Microsoft official documentation to see what registry changes might be necessary for a Windows system in order that a .dmp file will be created at the time of a crash. Next let’s look at supportability and best practice settings and where to find these for the NetWorker product.
It’s very important if you have a crashing scenario that you’re sure that all of the important components in your network environment are supported and the way you can be sure of this is by using the E-Lab Navigator tool. The E-Lab Navigator can be found as shown here and will give you details of all of the environment components for a NetWorker system and what is supported with what for all the different versions. So the E-Lab Navigator can be accessed on the standard Dell support site and you then select Data Protection and NetWorker and go to the version that you have and here you have a solid list of all of the components and what is supported with what. As regards best practices the document you need is the Performance Optimization Planning Guide.
This will give a full rundown of all of the best practices for ultimate performance with your NetWorker system be they networking best practices or memory CPU all of the different storage node components and everything that could be running and is important on your NetWorker system. How to get the best possible performance from this is detailed in this Performance Optimization Planning Guide which you can find likewise on the Dell support site. We’re gathering information about the NetWorker server we have two tools which can be downloaded on the NetWorker tools section of the Dell support site.
These are NSRget and Package Core. The first NSRget is used to gather all of the relevant information about a NetWorker environment which may be useful for support. We run this tool on either Linux or Windows operating system and it will automatically gather the relevant logs and metadata information for the NetWorker system and can be very useful in quickly getting to the heart of what’s going on in the NetWorker environment and helping with NetWorker support issues. We download this tool from the NetWorker tool section and then run it on the NetWorker server and it will generate the necessary .tar.gz file in this case which can be provided to support. For a Windows system it is sufficient to provide this NSRget output as well as the DMP file that was generated on Windows and NetWorker support will be able to analyze these together. However for a Linux system we do need to do what is called core file packaging.
This is packaging up the libraries associated with the NetWorker processes as well as the core dump file itself and both of these will be necessary for investigation of the crashing issue. Core Dump will usually be found in the NSR cores directory. Here we see it’s NSRmmdbd which has generated a core file and using the file command we can confirm that this is a core file and therefore it can be analyzed to see what caused the crashing process. We can then use the Linux Package Core utility which we have downloaded.
The syntax for the command is called the script linux_pkgcore.sh followed by some text for the output which is going to be used to identify the output afterwards and then the path to the core file and then the path to the binary which crashed at the time of the core file generation. In this case user/sbin/nsrmmdbd. So it’s script the first parameter is the output format then it’s the core file itself then it’s the path to the actual process which was involved in the crashing. The tool generates two .tar.gz files which can be provided to Dell support for analysis as well as the NSRGAA output.
