On Tue, 7 Feb 1995, Julyan Cartwright wrote:
> The good news for the future is that, as Paul E. Rockwell put it:
> DEC OSF/1 version 3.2 will ship with NetWorker SingleServer -
> a stripped down version of PolyCenter NetWorker Save and Restore that will
> allow it to back up the system that it's running on. Your license to
> use this product is included with your OSF-BASE license t. - that is it's
> usable at no extra cost to you.
This is good news in a way but there are some questions I like to ask.
When I evaluated the full version of DEC-NSR on our Alpha, I liked it but
decided not to buy the product for two reasons:
1) It uses it's own proprietary tape format and didn't support open
standard tape formats like cpio, tar and dump. Another package called
BudTools does and we've almost decided to buy it on this basis since we
exchange tapes with other groups. BudTools is very similar to DEC-NSR.
2) We wanted some of our users to use the backup/restore facility to
manage their own files at will. I couldn't configure DEC-NSR to allow
normal users to do this without giving them the same privilege as root. I
just want users to access files on the system using their own login
privileges. Please correct me if I'm wrong - there may be a way to do
this with DEC-NSR. The reason we need to do this is they (geological
remote sensing group) deal with very large data files so the disks can
quickly fill up. They want to be able to quickly and easily transfer
files using a user-friendly interface. They also need to manage their
files and keep a history of what's happened on-line. From my observations
BudTools employs a better approach which uses much less disk space to keep
records of all the tape transactions.
Now the bad news about BudTools. It's not supported on OSF/1. So if we
buy it, it will have to be installed on one of our Suns and the users have
to run it across the network.
So, my question is will the DEC OSF/1 version 3.2 of NetWorker
SingleServer have the same "limitations" outlined above?
--
Jack N. Churchill | Jack.Churchill_at_dem.csiro.au
CSIRO Division of Exploration and Mining | http://www.csiro.au
PO Box 136 North Ryde NSW 2113 | Phone: +61 2 887 8884
Australia | Fax: +61 2 887 8921
Received on Tue Feb 07 1995 - 19:18:38 NZDT