Urgent help needed: Licensing snafu following server crash

[D . Thomas Podnar]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 05:33:40PM -0400, Brian K. White wrote:
> >
> > Simply a SCO-specific product? Boy, have you not been paying attention.
> >
> 
> No, Olympus TuneUP is SCO-specific. The point was that I no longer use 
> TuneUP either but in that case it's simply because the product doesn't apply 
> to me any more, not because of any unhappiness with the product. I meant to 
> say that this is more like why BE isn't on any of one class of my boxes. 
> Simply because this class of box and my overall system of usage of them just 
> isn't served by BE. I don't think it's a problem or failing BE needs to 
> address, but if you want to you can. I don't mind going over my system 
> (system in the larger sense, as in how I use boxes in general, not a 
> particular box) with you in more detail so you can see what exactly I'm 
> doing (it's not that amazing or complex, but it is a little new compared to 
> traditional systems) and if you want to create or adjust a product to 
> provide significant value somehow and tap into that potential business, I'll 
> at least listen. I don't think there is any business there to be had but I 
> won't work to obstruct things.

I apologized for the TuneUP issue in an earlier response. I'll cover your other comments on in-house systems below.
> 
> For the record, customer boxes are different and they all get BE.

Thanks!

> > Linux represents 41% of my 2007 business (Jan 1 - Sep 15). AIX has 
> > another, although smaller, percentage.
> >
> > I'll put my bare metal disaster recovery and encryption capabilities for 
> > Linux against any product you want to name. And our support for storage 
> > deveices, D2D and network backups is outstanding.
> 
> BE is really nice but it's not any more perfect than anything else. Some 
> items:

Nothing's perfect. But we try ;-)

> I have boxes with BE installed that cannot generate an re2 iso.
> It might be that openSUSE is not fully supported (it wasn't in the official 
> supported list back when some of these boxes that have this problem were 
> installed, though they were subsequently updated and still didn't work)
> It might be the special lsi raid card kernel module needed to boot.
> It might be the reserfs filesystem
> It might be my particular boot/swap/root/other-fs's/raid configuration.
> It might be the 64 bit OS.
> It might be my particular grub boot loader config.
> It might be ??? until I can get around to calling support and getting this 
> looked at we'll never know.

It can definitely be a lot of things. That's why we have a support department and an engineering department. FYI, BackupEDGE 2.2 added support for a bunch of new Linux releases, including openSUSE.

It is generally a certainty that if your BackupEDGE version is older than your operating system version, they'll have changed something and you'll need an update from us for disaster recovery to work.

> I also have boxes that when I read the tape it goes part way and then 
> crashes out with directory in invalid format and I can't get anything off 
> the tape beyond that point. Meanwhile a manual star command dumping the same 
> fs to the same tape on the same drive has no problem reading the full tape 
> later.

Interesting. No way to even comment without more information.

> I haven't called tech support to try and resolve these which is why I didn't 
> cite them as problems or reasons. That wouldn't exactly be fair. But it is 
> yet another factor for me at least at the moment. Sorry you haven't been 
> allowed even the chance to fix it, but unfortunately it just works out that 
> since I have these other forms of backup in place, fixing BE has been a low 
> priority that I haven't gotten around to yet. Sometime I will I promise.

Ok.

> Beyond all that, Also I don't bother to include cd or floppy drives on some 
> boxes any more because I can make a suse installer that boots from a 64M usb 
> stick and gets the install media via http from one of my own boxes or from 
> any number of public mirrors. There are several reasons to use this beyond 
> the inconsequential $64 it saves off the cost of the server. I can get 2u 
> server cases that have 12 hot-swap drive bays in front, this occupies the 
> entire front and the 4 extra spindles and the rack space are each worth way 
> more to me than a cd drive. It's easier to modify and customize a usb stick 
> than a cd.  So unless RE2 can start generating usb boot sticks in place of 
> cd's, it's not all that much advantage for me over non supertar systems for 
> these boxes.

Media? Shmedia. What you're doing in not having CDs and floppies is great, and probably better from a security standpoint.

Our solution to that issue was to go completely media free two years ago. It is possible to use PXE booting, i.e. boot into RecoverEDGE image directly from the network, without bothering with a floppy or CD. With FTP backups, you don't need to even attach a storage device, just boot from the network, restore from the network, and be on your way. I'm surprised your not using it that way. RecoverEDGE images on the TFTP server are a lot harder to lose than floppies, CDs, DVDs, REVs, boot tapes, or USB sticks.

USB CD/DVD drives are a secondary solution, but PXE booting was designed specifically for the blade server world and works very well.

I've added USB flash booting to the wish list stack.

> > We expect to do our jobs well to earn peoples' business, and to be there 
> > when they need us. I'm sorry we've failed to do that for you. Certainly I 
> > can think of places where we aren't the right product, and we continue to 
> > try to improve our products in those areas.
> >
> > I'm not sure from your email whether you protect your client's systems 
> > with other commercial, or with "free" software. Look at all the dead 
> > projects on sourceforge. They go up with great fanfare, and last as long 
> > as the original developer maintains interest. Then they die, along with 
> > support, while the writer or writers bounc to the next "cool" thing. Not 
> > everyone can read sourcecode to solve a customer problem, or make changes 
> > when the next operating system update breaks the program.
> 
> Indeed. It's free stuff but it's long long standing, widely used things like 
> rsync and star, and even star I can replace with any tar-or-cpio-alike.

I'll push back on that a little also. Internally, the BackupEDGE format has longer pathname limits, full integrity checksums, ACL support, encryption, compression and many more other features than tar, cpio, star, etc.

Rsync is a GREAT product for replication, but not archiving.

None of those products can restore the last file from a 60GB archive over the network in 5 or 6 seconds from the command line, CI or GUI. I could go on.

>                                                                         For 
> the re2 aspect I just use the amazing installers all linux has these days. 
> It's actually easy to install a fully software raid system using the 
> opensuse installer. You have to know that you need to create at least a 
> small raid1 /boot and the rest can be raid0  or raid5, but it's easy to do, 
> the installer does automatically handle all the fancy parts that make it 
> actually work. (setting up the grub config, the initrd with all necessary 
> kernel modules, correct device nodes and mdadm commands etc...)

For building a new system, installing the OS is OK. For disaster recovery, the time just building the OS (before installing updates and restoring data) is probably going to be longer than it will take RecoverEDGE to have the system running. Time is money, especially when someone is down. Reconfiguring systems and doing disaster recovery tend to be two different things.

> As I said, I really did not intend to paint BE as having any kind of 
> problem, or at least not enough of one to drive a person away. I really am 
> sorry for that. BE has in no way earned displeasure from me the way other 
> things have.

Thanks Brian. I appreciate that. There is a huge tendency to think of BackupEDGE in terms of legacy products since we've been around so long. But it is quite modern in most ways.

36 people took our certification class in Las Vegas last month. Most commom entry on the comment forms was "I didn't know it could do all that".

Reading the current BackupEDGE newsletters and whitepapers may prove interesting:
www.microlite.com/NewsletterSeptember2007.pdf
www.microlite.com/NewsletterJuly2007.pdf
ftp://ftp.microlite.com/media/current

> 
> Brian K. White    brian at aljex.com    http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
> +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++.
> filePro  BBx    Linux  SCO  FreeBSD    #callahans  Satriani  Filk!
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Kindest regards, and thanks to everyone for their patience while Brian and I express our thoughts and passions.

-- 
Tom
  D. Thomas Podnar
  Microlite Corporation
  2315 Mill Street
  Aliquippa PA USA 15001-2228
  724-375-6711
  888-257-3343 Sales
Developers of Microlite BackupEDGE