NetBackup NOT expiring images?

[Stumpr]

I've never come across this before and my curiosity is twigged. I would like some people to please check the image catalog for images that SHOULD be expired because the retention period has passed but are still active. I am in the process of manually expiring ALL the daily images from a specific day that should have expired over a week ago. Every image from that day on all platforms, media servers, and clients FAILED to expire via NetBackup when the expiration time was reached. And they continue to NOT expire each day for the last week. Normally I would just do the cleanup and chalk it up to some unknown anomaly. However I have noticed increased chatter about expiring images and deassigning tapes in several of the user groups. I think something is up with the product NB4.5_FP5

Bob Stump
Incorrigible punster -- Do not incorrige

 

[Stumpr]

My full apologies to everyone that spent time on this issue.
The problem was simple and once I sat down and thought it out I was able to resolve it. The images were expiring as defined by the retention periods. I forgot that copy 2 had a retention of 1 week longer than copy 1. Copy 1 expired after 2 weeks as defined by the retention. Copy 2 remained active for an additional week as it was defined by its retention. The problem was between the keyboard and the chair Please consider this event closed.

Bob Stump
Incorrigible punster -- Do not incorrige

 

[PGPhantom]

Hmmm - What is between the keyboard and chair? I've got it, a mouse ;-)

 

[wamason]

Stumpr,

I am having the same issue, but I have everything defined for 3 months and today I am still deassigning tapes created February 20th. Any ideas where to look. The Master server has Ret.level 5 which is 3 months and all my classes are defined for 3 months retention. Am I missing anything? This only started happening recently. Any ideas??????

 

[PGPhantom]

Have you checked the media in question to see exactly what images are on it? Maybe there is an oracle stream with an infinity retention?

Use the command
bpimmedia -mediaid <TapeNumber> -L
To see what images are on the specific tape.

 

[wamason]

'No entity found' which I think means that there is no images on the tape. Am I correct?

 

[PGPhantom]

Not necessarily - It may not be finding the tape correctly depending on where you are running hte command from. Change the command to:
bpimmedia -mediaid <TapeNumber> -L -M <Master server>

 

[YouEnjoyMyself]

I am running into the same issue. Images that should be expired are not expired. I currently have Veritas looking into it. AHs anyone found any solutions?

 

[Vela]

Do you ever run CLEAN_IN_BACKGROUND

I think this is a great database cleanup utility as long as your retentions are set to what they should be.

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/236274.htm

 

[lenski]

have you run

bpexpdate -deassignempty

it will expire empty tapes or complain and pinpoint any issues.

 

[syjl]

Another thing to keep in mind is that NBU only cleans the images up during the catalog backup so if it can't run because backups are going 24x7, then the images never get removed.

 

[YouEnjoyMyself]

Vela,

What exactly is the clean_in_background utility. I dont see it mentioned in any of the Netbackup Documentation. Also are there any dangers in running this utility? Any info would be great.

 

[Vela]

Clean in Background will run when there is an idle time when no backups occur. In our enviroment there's 24x7 backups running so the Image DB and the Media DB are out of sync.

Clean in Background will go through and remove any DB files that still exist that should be expired.

You can run clean in background on a single client this way-

bpimage -cleanup -client (client name)

I verified that this will only remove the expired DB files for a single client.

You can also run this command against all clients

bpimage -cleanup -allclients


Ryan

 

[YouEnjoyMyself]

Ryan,

Thanks. We dont run 24x7 backups in our enviroment so I dont think that is what is causing our images not to expire. I have opened up a case with Veritas on this issue and they sent me some ways to resolve our issues. Although they can not give a reason for why it happened in the first place.

 

[enterprisebu]

lenski,

I get the following whenever I try to run bpexpdate. Any ideas?

Could not build list of media, socket read failed
socket read failed

 

[letournp]

If u have NBU 5.1, there is a MP2 available that correct a problem with media expiration