Friday, June 26, 2015

Remote Site Backup

Ok here is the scenario, we have a 2.8TB Windows file server at a remote location and we have to back it up over the WAN.  We can't put a TSM server locally due to many issues (one is that it's not worth wasting resources on 2-3 servers). Due to throughput the backup was calculated to possibly take 25+ days to complete. So the idea I came up with was to copy the data onto a 4TB USB  drive and then ship the drive to our Data Center and attach it to another Windows server as the same drive name/label and the drive has at the remote site, setup a dsm.opt with the node name of the remote server and run the backup. The hope is that then when we run the backup remotely it will see all it's data as already backed up and then pickup with incremental backups. Will it work? Anyone tried it? I'm worried there are too many file variables involved and it will still try and backup the files all over again.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

RHEL 6.6, non IBM devices and UDEV rules

Few days back we had to move one of our TSM servers and its library - which is a shared one. Did it before with TSM version 5.x and everything was fine that day. Now we are on the 7.1 and I have found that even the SANDISCOVERY found the new path correctly (and updated it on the Library Manager), drives were not working.
TSM 6.x+ server does not run under "root" account anymore, but when the new device is discovered, its device file is created as RW for root only.
Normaly (when you manually add the new device) you update the device files privileges and create the links using "/opt/tivoli/tsm/devices/bin/autoconf -a", but this does not work automatically.

On the TSM Symposium 2013 in Berlin there was a great presentation "Tape configuration for TSM" by Bruno Friess which (among other things) solves this situation by using persistent names via "udev".
http://www.exstor.de/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/tape_config_for_tsm.pdf
 
It only has a 2 minor limitations
a) Linux variant mentioned is SLES
b) lacks details for Linux, udev and non-IBM devices

As our Linux servers run on RHEL amd our libraries are Overland brand with HP tape drives, I had to modify the steps a bit:
a) udevadm info .... does not display serial numbers for HP tape drives and Overland libraries - you need sg3_utils package for having "sginfo" command to get the device serial numbers
b) links are created as /dev/library1 and /dev/drive1 (2, 3) pointing to corresponding /dev/sgX device with crw-rw-rw permissions
c) file below was created as /etc/udev/rules.d/71-persistent-tape.rules
# This file shoud create persistent devices for HP tapes and libraries used by TSM

# Known serial numbers
# <library1>    LIBRSN1234
# <drive1>      DRV1SN3456
# <drive2>      DRV2SN4567
# <drive3>      DRV3SN5678

KERNEL=="sg*", SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_generic", SYSFS{type}=="8", PROGRAM="/usr/bin/sginfo -s /dev/%k", RESULT=="*LIBRSN1234*", SYMLINK+="library1",MODE="0666"
KERNEL=="sg*", SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_generic", PROGRAM="/usr/bin/sginfo -s /dev/%k", RESULT=="*DRV1SN3456*", SYMLINK+="drive1",MODE="0666"
KERNEL=="sg*", SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_generic", PROGRAM="/usr/bin/sginfo -s /dev/%k", RESULT=="*DRV2SN4567*", SYMLINK+="drive2",MODE="0666"
KERNEL=="sg*", SUBSYSTEM=="scsi_generic", PROGRAM="/usr/bin/sginfo -s /dev/%k", RESULT=="*DRV3SN5678*", SYMLINK+="drive3",MODE="0666"
Many thanks to Bruno and hope this helps someone.

Monday, June 08, 2015

Best Desktop Linux Distro

Ok not a TSM subject, but I am running Linux (Kubuntu 15.04) on an old Sony laptop and while I like it, something is missing. I want a launcher bar but didn't like Unity. Anyone out there suggest a distro that they like? I've used Mint with Cinnamon and Mate but thought I'd try KDE again after the new release.  I don't particularly like GNOME but....