From: osyjm@cs.montana.edu (Jaye Mathisen)
Subject: Re: Backups with NSR, experience...?
Organization: CS
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 23:43:20 GMT

In article <1993Jan26.200043.8598@newsgate.sps.mot.com> beutel@chdasic.sps.mot.com writes:
>
>Does anybody out there have any practical experience
>with the network backup product called NSR from Digital?
[stuff deleted]
>Saw a short demo on the product at DEC. Sounds like the 
>OSF answer to backup. Want to hear from REAL users of the 
>product.....

I am a real user, and a moderately dissatisfied user.  If you want,
I might be able to dig out my old postings about NSR.

The current release, 2.0 is a piece of junk.  I've stopped tracking
bugs, and buglets, I'm not going to waste the time it would take to 
SPR them all, only to have them not get fixed.

Problems range from just stupid formatting errors, to "Why can't
NSR figure out how much to dump when it's backing up HP's", to "Why doesn't
NSR dump any where near the amount of data in the file system, under
HPUX on 9000/700's", to "Hmph, I can no longer do any backups
at all", to "Uh oh, my tape drive is now in a state that I can't do 
anything with it, except kill NSR", to "Uh oh, I need to shutdown NSR
during a save, crash! (albeit this is documented as a problem under 
4.3)", to "This decwindows interface works weirdly", to "Hmph, I specified
a name to a save set, and now at least with the standard utils (recover,
and decnsr) I can't recover any files from it.  Am I forced to go back
to using scanner and the *uasm stuff to get the files?" , to  if you use
the multiple stream interface, it's trivially easy to get in to a state
where you can't label any more tapes", to "Uh oh, NSR can't keep track
of the label on a tape, it labels it, mounts it, and then says it's not
in the index", to "The stupid doc files on the DEC(ember) condist don't 
document the version that's on the binaries of the condist", etc etc ad pukeum.

So anyway, my next few weeks are going to be spent switching back to 1.1,
and having to re-run scanner on all my tape to rebuild the stupid index
files.  Even then, 1.1 had it's own set or problems, but at least they
weren't show stoppers like my current, "Uh oh, NSR won't back up anything
anymore, because the stupid thing won't let me label any more tapes, so I
hope nobody deletes anything serious, because my last NSR backup, which
I may or may not be able to read is 3 weeks old, because I can't fix the
stupid problem".

All of these are easily reproduced, heck, I put NSR on a different machine,
and can re-create many of them w/just a little work.  Sounds like the
NSR beta test needs more "real users".

If after all that, you still decide you want to wrangle an evaluation copy, 
ask for 1.1.  It doesn't have the HPUX support for the 9000/700's, and 
it doesn't have the fixes that make the index files MUCH smaller, 
but it's a whole lot more solid product.

I sincerely doubt that OSF has anything to do with NSR, it's just a 
repackaged Legato Networker...  I could be wrong about the OSF part though.

Oh well, enough ranting for this post.
-- 
 Jaye Mathisen, COE Systems Manager                (406) 994-4780
 410 Roberts Hall,Dept. of Computer Science
 Montana State University,Bozeman MT 59717	osyjm@cs.montana.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec