I have been working on a variety of tasks this week, but they all have a unifying theme: Antiquity.

An example would be what I posted on earlier in the week, Upgrading Antique FreeBSD Systems. One hurdle in this is making good full backups of the servers before any work is done. The FreeBSD systems were being backed up by an ancient combination of AMANDA (free, been around forever, a royal pain to deal with) and a few AIT-1 jukeboxes. This setup gave up the ghost not too long ago, so we have been doing the occasional dump via ssh backups in the meantime. Our normal environment makes use of NetBackup by Symantec (formerly Veritas), so I thought it would be nice to get the FreeBSD systems working on it as well. The FreeBSD 6.x systems were a piece of cake, but the 4.x systems were a problem. Not too long ago, NetBackup dropped support of older FreeBSD systems (and am sure they will drop all support for FreeBSD soon, which is sad). I had thought of a rickety solution of mounting the 4.x filesystems onto 6.x systems and backing them up from there, but the idea was so distasteful to me that I didn't even attempt it.

Then an old memory came back to me. The NetBackup servers are backwards compatable with older NetBackup clients. I remembered the day I discovered we had several old NetBackup 4.5 clients being backed up by NetBackup 6, and that it had probably been that way for years. So instead, I dug into our archives and pulled out our old NetBackup media. I copied the client directories to the master server, specifically FreeBSD/ from NetBackup 4.5 and FreeBSD4.5/ from NetBackup 5.0. I figured one of them would have to work. I tried installing the FreeBSD client from NetBackup 4.5, but it required COMPAT3X, which is not recommended. So then I tried the FreeBSD client from NetBackup 5.0, and it worked without a hitch. Sometimes, being a pack-rat comes in handy.

Some NetBackup links that might come in handy:

http://slashzeroconf.wordpress.com/category/veritas-netbackup/ http://blogs.netapp.com/barandgrill/2009/01/netbackup-scrip.html http://blogs.netapp.com/barandgrill/2009/02/netbackup-scrip.html http://en.wordpress.com/tag/veritas-netbackup/

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