This isn’t as straight forward as one might hope if you use VDM’s. Now, before I go on, I’m not going to go through the initial NDMP setup. Both EMC and Symantec have good documentation on this. However if you werent the person who initially configured all of this, you may still be tasked with backing up a new share.

First you need to figure out the root vdm that your share sits on, so putty to your celerra control station and run the following command:

nas_server –l –v

This will list all the VDM’s sitting on your Celerra. So the ID is the important part as it makes up the first part of the backup selection. So if the vdm you need to back up has an ID of 16 then the first part of your backup selection becomes:

/root_vdm_16/

Then, you will want to see what file systems are mounted on this VDM. To see this you need to run:

server_mount [name of VDM]

This will give you a list of the file systems and the mount points. Its this mount point that makes up the second part of your backup selection. So if you file system is called homes_fs on /homes_fs_1 then your full backup selection (including vdm from above) would be

/root_vdm_16/homes_fs_1

This is further expandable depending on how you’ve configured your CIFS Shares, but normally you should just be able to follow the path straight to the folder you need to backup, e.g:

/root_vdm_16/homes_fs_1/danoneill/mustbebackedup

As John points out in the comments below… It really is quite simple… One command:

server_df

This lists all the file systems and their VDM’s.

One thing that I’ve come across recently from a bit of a odd situation is the Bypass traverse checking group policy object.

Basically, what this allows users to do, is traverse folders that they should have no access to…

This is how it is explained in Microsoft’s technet article about it…

This user right determines which users can traverse directory trees even though the user may not have permissions on the traversed directory. This privilege does not allow the user to list the contents of a directory, only to traverse directories.

This normally would bother anyone, unless during a very sensitive data move that requires you leave the permissions of the underlying data alone. In this case, you have a top level folder with a certain set of permissions but because of an audit rule you have to leave the permissions on the lower level folders alone for a period of time.

You would expect the users not to be able to get to the data below the top level folder – why should they? You’ve set the permissions correctly on the top of the folder and then the Bypass traverse checking group policy object steps in. And ruins your day.

Slight exaggeration, and easily dealt with since we don’t knowingly use this GPO for anything else in the server. This is the default user set that can, by default, gain access via this group policy:

• Administrators
• Backup Operators
• Power Users
• Users
• Everyone

Out comes the “everyone” group, and now we’re nicely audit compliant.

Normally this would not be a problem as most of you will force replication after a folder move, thus inherit the permissions of the top level folder and block the user from traversing the folder as they will have no access to the folder below the top level.

XKCD – Legendary. This web comic is absolutely hilarious and definitely worth a regular read!

So normally, I’d open up a console RDP session to the win2003 server using mstsc /v: servername /console. This connects to session 0 on the box and allows me to disconnect the session and leave it running overnight and not have my session time out and cause the job to fail. However recently I updated mstsc.exe on my machine to version 6.0 to resolve another problem I was having remoting to my XP machine from my Vista PC at home. However it appeared that the /console switch no longer worked. Also when the /? switch was used, it wasn’t even mentioned.

This creates a problem in that I couldn’t connect to console sessions to complete long tasks. However, while looking at the above instructions I noticed the /admin switch. Did they just rename it? I tried it and excellently I was able to log on to a console session created with the old mstsc application using the /console switch. Brilliant news. So to connect to any console session on a win2003 box all I had to do was mstsc /v: servername /admin. I decided to follow it up however to see why the change was made and if indeed if any change was made. I came across the following article http://blog.shijaz.com/2008/01/no-more-mstscexe-console.html which explained the situation with the application and why the change was made. Also, this is going to come up even more with the increased uptake of windows server 2008, as explained in the above article. It makes for an interesting read and explains Microsofts thinking about how console sessions will work in future (i.e. not at all ).