Some Tools to Become Familiar With

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Where to Find Information to Assist in Self-Diagnosis

The best source for troubleshooting information is located in the application troubleshooting guide. This information is located online with many of the applications today and is accessible via hot keys. The operating system also contains valuable information to help in diagnosing problems, including the man pages and other online documentation. As you get into some of the more complex configurations, the troubleshooting also gets more complex. If you are using a SAN, there are actual diagnostic tools for the different elements in the SAN, such as the switch, the router, and even the host bus adapter (HBA). Each of these devices has its own set of error codes, logging facility, and monitoring tool. VERITAS also has a log analysis utility that you can download from their support FTP site. This utility is designed to help analyze the debug logs on either backups or restores. You can enter a job ID, and the utility will extract information for all the logs related to the selected job. This utility is available at http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/248369.htm.

As you consider troubleshooting your backup, remember, it is an application that touches many parts of the system. With this in mind, you should become familiar with some of the assistance commands and support tools available at the operating system level. Your backup application, such as NetBackup, is an application, and as such, it relies on the operating system and its infrastructure to accomplish its mission.

Tools are available with most operating systems that will assist you in gathering additional information produced by the operating system during its normal operation. The first place to look is usually the system's own logs. Many times, errors that seem to occur in the backup application are actually triggered by a lower-level failure that is seen by the operating system. Often, these types of failures are reported to the application and in turn reported as an error code by the application. A case in point is a Status 23 reported by NetBackup. NetBackup describes this as a 'Cannot Connect on Socket' error. While this is technically true, the underlying cause is usually found to be a failure in the system networking structure.

Although this section cannot delve into all types of errors and their analysis, we hope that an explanation of how you may go about resolving issues will help you understand the interaction and usage of the operating system tools as a means of troubleshooting and solving problems. We hope that after finishing this chapter, you will begin to automatically think of the interaction of the application, operating systems, mechanical infrastructure, and mechanical infrastructure software found in the switches, routers, and drives that make up an enterprise.

In the next section, we help you include the infrastructure used by the application itself as part of your troubleshooting technique. This will help you to become more efficient in your daily activities.

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