NetBackup - Listing all clients and their versions

Quick Post -
After sorting through a few old files I found a nice little bash script that I used in the past. I was tasked with updating the NetBackup Linux clients to the most recent version which for me was 7.5. One of the nice features about having the NetBackup master installed on a RHEL server was that I could push client updates to my Linux servers without needing root (or any account) access. The command to do this is update_clients which will need a -ClientList parameter passed as well. As -ClientList suggests it needs a list of clients. To make my life easier for creating a list of clients I used this script to output every client and other details that I used to format and filter the clients I needed. Check it out!

NetBackup - Estimating the amount of data to be restored

At work I manage the Symantec NetBackup 7.5 environment (RHEL6.5). Every once in a while I'll get a request to restore some data from tape but what I have noticed is that it is somewhat difficult to tell how much data I will be restoring. NetBackup doesn't seem to have an easy way to show the amount of data that will be restored. I search but couldn't really find anything so if anyone has an easier way I would like to know. Anyways, I decided to take matters into my own hands and craft a quick little script to help me.

These steps are done on a NetBackup Linux master server. If you're using Windows Server well the bash script may not help much but the theory should still be sound. Maybe one day I will port it over to Windows...

1. Use the bplist command to find all files and folders that you will be restoring. If you have never used it before I'd suggest to check out Symantec's tech note on bplist. In this example I will be using bplist to list all files/folders from a NDMP client.
   
   

    bplist -C ndmpclientname -S netbackupmaster -k NDMP-policy -t 19 -b -l -s 02/22/2014 00:00:00 -e 03/01/2014 00:00:00 /vol/DirToRestore > ndmp_bplist  
   




2. The above command lists files and folders in a format similar to if you were to use the "ls -l" command in the terminal.
   
   Example:
   

    drwxrwxrwx 2259   2259       4096 Feb 13 21:37 /vol/DirToRestore/test1  
    drwxrwxrwx 2259   2259       4096 Feb 13 21:37 /vol/DirToRestore/test2  
    -r-xr--r-- 2259   2259       727 Feb 13 21:37 /vol/DirToRestore/File1  
   




3. At this point you technically have all the file sizes in Bytes, for example, File1 is 727 Bytes. Of course it isn't that easy when you are restoring 100,000 files. You could sit there and start adding all day or just use the below script.

Usage: ./GetTotalSize.sh ndmp_bplist

The above script can be modified to include TB at some point. As a disclaimer I have only used it for UNIX clients. It assumes that column 4 is the size of the file in the bplist output. If for some reason this isn't true than the script will fail. Enjoy!