URGENT: issue with BAR on Ubuntu 12.0.4 VM

[GiorgioF]

Hi all,

I have a great issue with a case that our Master Partner opened  for a very important italian customer that has a great NBU install base for both physical and virtual environments. 

Context:

Our customer would like to launch a service for his final customers, consisting in Infrastructure as a Service: they will sell VM, based on Ubuntu 12.0.4 (vCloud 5.1) and different backup service levels, sold at different prices. Operating System MUST be Ubuntu.

One of this service level (the most complete and expensive for final users) will include the Self Backup of the VMs, through the BAR interface on that VMs

NBU version: 7.6.0.1

The issue:

If you try launch BAR, jbpSA for BAR is not working for the client . 

Here the nbj logs have the following error - 

"ServerInterface:setDebugLevel:262144 
BpjavaLoginModule:Setting ServerRequest debug:262144 
BpjavaLoginModule:connectServer:[root][<users_pw>][ubutst][0] 
Connecting to vnetd service over PBX port = 1556 
ServerInterface:Logon:Exception encountered null 
ServerInterface:Logon - Initial host:null, Current host:ubutst, PBX port:1556 
Can not connect to the NB-Java authentication service on ubutst on port 1556. Exception:" 

From Software Compatibility list it seems that Ubuntu is supported (see please page 13 at http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH76648), but we found that Client support is guaranteed while BAR not.

What we tried:

Nevertheless our partner asked Support to see if it was possible to force the jbpSA to use 13722 port and vnetd (after configuring bpjava-msvc - 13722 port - Xinetd services) instead of PBX (by modifying the nbj.conf for example): Support replied to try to remove in nbj.conf file the line PBX_PORT=1556  and leaving only VNETD_PORT=13724. We tried but we have another error: 520: invalid value for NB-java configuration option PBX_PORT:NULL.

Support finally replied that as BAR GUI is not supported on UBUNTU, we don’t have any other chances…

Do you have any suggestion or workaround on this? I believe there is something real “stupid” to be configured, because GUI works if we point, for example, Master or another client…so there is something on the internal authentication that doesn’t work with PBX. If you never faced this kind of issues, is there any PM that can help us by interfacing Engineering?

Without BAR GUI on Ubuntu our customer will not be ready to launch this service thus impacting his revenues…

Please let me know and many thanks in advance for your collaboration.

If you need any other info please send me private email.

Best regards,

Fabio Giorgio

[Marianne]

Go a bit further in OS Compatibility Guide... to NetBackup Administration Consoles.

You will see that Java Console for Ubuntu is not supported...

About PBX:
Why not allow port 1556?

All server/client comms is by default using 1556 as from NBU 7.0.1.

[mph999 · Accepted solution]

The design of this solution needs to be changed - it is absolute madness to try and sell something based on what is a known unsupported config, and further than that, doesn't currently work.  In the event of 'failure' of the solution this puts the partners, as well as Symantecs reputation at risk and I image would potentially leave 'doors open' for financial or legal 'consequences'.

I honestly don't mean to sound unhelpful, but I coud give endless exmples of 'unsupported' solutions that have caused massive amounts of 'pain' .

There are various reasons why things are unsupported, sometime it is because they haven't yet been tested, and sometimes, it is simply because they don't work.  In this case, it is not to say that changes won't be made in the furture to make them work, but there, as far as I know, is no shorcut to this.

There is one way to engineering, and that is via a backline escalation - if a case is opened and escalated to BL, I doubt they would escalate an unsupported feature on a brand new setup, when it is clealy indicated in the documentation it is unsupported. Even if it could be made to work, you still have an unsupported system that could be disastrous, if for example a future code change caused it to break in a way it couldn't be fixed.