Email notifications without BLAT
Hello,
I am trying to retreive email notifications from NetBackup 7.5. My supervisor does not want me to download BLAT so I wrote a VBScript that uses CDO to send emails. I wrote a line in nbmail.cmd that runs the script with parameters:
cscript mailtest.vbs %1 %2 %3
The parameters I used are what was defined in nbmail.cmd. I have tested running just the nbmail.cmd through the server and it works, I have gotten emails from there, but when I try to have NetBackup send it, I get nothing. I have configured the Universal Settings in the clients to include my email and have tried both "Server sends mail" and "Client sends mail". I ran a backup and even saw it complete, but I got no email.
Note: The scripts that I configured are all on the master server, but I added them to the client servers as well to test out.
Any help would be much appreciated.
However, sometimes it is useful to capture the output, and errors if any, of commands embedded within scripts that NetBackup calls. So, I usually like to start Windows DOS batch scripts with this at the very start:
@echo off setlocal enabledelayedexpansion set z_path=%~dp0 set z_name=%~n0 set z_file_log=!z_path!!z_name!.log
...which means:
1) @echo off - the leading @ stops the next command from being echo'd, and echo off disables echoing for the rest of the script
2) setlocal enabledelayedexpansion - means that variables can be expanded within loops using the exclamation (or shriek) characters, i.e. these ! !, because if you try to use a % % around variable names inside code inside a loop then they pre-expanded before the loop actually starts, whereas using ! ! means that variables get expanded at the time the line of code being intrepreted actually executes.
3) set z_path=%~dp0 - means, store in the variable named z_path the value of parameter 0 (i.e. the full file specification of the script being executed), but extract just the drive letter and folder path (dp = drive+path) segment from the full path of the file name of the script being executed.
4) set z_name=%~n0 - means, store in the variable named z_name the value of paramter 0 (i.e. the full path specification of the script being executed), but just extract the name part/segment of the full script file name.
5) set z_file_log=!z_path!!z_name!.log - means store in a variable named z_file_log, the contents of the variables z_path and z_name and add the characters .log to the end of those values - so, what this means is that the variable z_file_log now holds a full drive letter + folder path + filename + file extenstion of '.log', which is great because it means that now we can use that full "log file" specification file name to capture output from other commands - which also means that the log file for any script that you use this code in also lives in the same folder as the script that NetBackup calls.
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Now that we have a decent log file name, this means that instead of binning (to nul, to the bit-bucket) any output or errors from a call to 'cscript', that instead now we can capture the output, so in your nbmail.cmd script you could now do something like:
cscript mailer.vbs %1 %2 %3 >>"!z_file_log!" 2>&1
...which means:
- cscript - means run the VBscript interpretation engine named cscript.exe
- mailer.vbs - means tells the 'cscript' engine to open and begin reading and to start executing the contents of mailer.vbs
- %1 %2 %3 - means pass the three DOS parameters (that mail.cmd received from NetBackup) to the command line so the cscript will make them available to mailer.vbs
- >>"!z_file_log!" - means >> = append, and append to a file whose name is inside z_file_log, i.e. the use of surrounding ! ! characters tell DOS to expand the contents of the variable named z_file_log, and the surrounding quotes " " are required because the full drive+folder+name+.log inside z_file_log may contain spaces, and so using " " tells DOS to keep it all together
- 2>&1 - means do the same for stderr as you do for stdout, and so any DOS or cscript errors also get appended to the contents of the log file.
- and note how we didn't need a leading '@' on this command, because we already disabled echoing above with the '@echo off' command.
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And I like to capture the exit status of the cscript command, so that I can writethe status to the log file, so that we can see why our cscript command, or the execution of mailer.vbs, may have failed, e.g.:
set z_sts=!errorlevel! echo call to cscript status code was !z_sts! >>"z_file_log!" 2>&1 exit /b !z_sts!
...which means:
- set z_sts=!errorlevel! - means store in teh variable named z_sts the volume of the variable errorlevel, see how the use of !errorlevel! tells DOS to expand errorlevel in to the contents of errorlevel.
- and then the echo sends a string of words and the contents (because we're using ! ! again) of z_sts to stdout, but our use of >>"!z_file_log!" means append stdout to the end of the file whose name is expanded out of the contents of variable z_file_log, and finnaly our old friend 2>&1 means do the same with errors which be generated by the echo command.
- exit /b !z_sts! - means exit teh script, and /b means just exit this level instance ie. don't exit the whole chain of calling/called DOS scripts, and !z_sts! tells the exit command to pass back the contents of the variable z_sts, i.e. to pass backup a final exit code back to the NetBackup process which called nbmail.cmd in the first place.
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So, maybe your nbmail.cmd could look someting like:
@echo off setlocal enabledelayedexpansion set z_path=%~dp0 set z_name=%~n0 set z_file_log=!z_path!!z_name!.log cscript mailer.vbs %1 %2 %3 >>"!z_file_log!" 2>&1 set z_sts=!errorlevel! echo call to cscript status code was !z_sts! >>"z_file_log!" 2>&1 exit /b !z_sts!
...which will now run silently, and pass back a proper exit code, and capture all output and all errors in a file named "nbmail.log", as a companion file in the same folder that "nbmail.cmd" lives in.
HTH.
