I’ve just spent several hours — make that most of the damn day — trying to get our Veritas NetBackup software to “talk” to our Network Appliance file-servers. This has been driving me nuts to the point of wanting to pound my head against the desk, keyboard, monitor, etc.
The problem is that the Veritas authentication mechanism wasn’t authenticating to the filer. Yet everything appeared to be setup correctly on both sides — the change that caused this was that I had upgraded the OS on the filers to the latest production release.
Attempts to locate documentation on the vendor’s websites failed miserably. The only “How To” available on both sites was the same document … for a VERY OLD version of NetBackup that not only doesn’t look anything like the current version, but some of the commands referenced don’t exist anymore — assumably, they’ve been replaced.
I tried contacting both Veritas and Network Appliance for help. They each basically pointed at the other and said it was their fault.
Grrrrr …
Having nothing better to try, I tried changing the passwords on the filers and within the auth config. It worked! But putting the passwords back caused the same problem. It turns out, that the damn thing does’t work if the auth password is MORE THAN EIGHT CHARACTERS LONG !!!!
Now that I know EACTLY what the problem is, it was easy to find the solution on NetApp’s site: change the password to one shorter than 8 characters. DUH!! Too bad the tech on the phone couldn’t be bothered to suggest that a couple of hours ago!
You know … a career change to Sunflower farming is begining to look really good about now.