RE: Backup - revisited -- MIDRANGE-L

I hit the wrong key when I attempted to reply to the list and clarify the
situation in response to Scotts's post. I don't have a copy of the sent email.
I included the actual commands used by BBACKUP, with all parameters. That does
not address the cryptic response I got from the sa when I asked for details
concerning missing metadata. Details are not likely to be forthcoming from the
sa. That is not a good situation.

John McKee

Quoting Evan Harris <spanner@xxxxxxxxxx>:

Hi John

As others have said it's hard to explain what happened without more details,
particularly without the details of the errors that resulted in the call to
IBM. I do agree with Pete's assessment that you may have an SA that is a bit
out of his depth.

That being said I have seen a situation where a recovery did not go as
expected. In this case the consensus by all the people involved was that
somehow the backup "was not right" due to strange errors encountered during
testing. This case also resulted in a call to IBM.

By working through the documented recovery process they were using I
discovered that the recovery was accomplished by first IPL-ing the machine
from optical media and then continuing with the install of LIC from the
optical media. Only when doing the option 21 to Recover the system was the
original system save tape being specified, the end result being all sorts of
weird errors, although the system appeared on the surface to be operational.
The use of the optical media in the recovery was due to the tape drive not
being configured as an alt-IPL device.

The problem with the recovery - as many will have already realized - is that
the system was missing PTF's from the portion of the restore done from the
optical media. This resulted in all sorts of weird errors that suggested
that the save was somehow bad.

I don't know if this is your situation at all, but it sounds somewhat
similar. My suggestion is that you get someone who knows how to do a
recovery to run through your recovery process either with a system 21 or
with the HBOC save, or if necessary, with both. For instance IBM or an
independent consultant (sorry - I'm unavailable due to distance :)

Depending on how the HBOC saves were created or modified you may be able to
get HBOC to agree that if you find there is a problem with their backup
process that they will wear the cost of the "someone" to do the
investigation, otherwise your SA will have generated this for you.

I can say that if the save commands are being run then the best explanation
for your problems is in the restore process. This is almost certainly the
problem given that a save option 21 would not work.

Regards
Evan Harris

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John McKee
Sent: Wednesday, 3 September 2008 3:13 a.m.
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Backup - revisited

I apologize for not being able to continue the former thread. Don't have
access
to that email.

Just had a rather testy meeting that included the system administrator.

What I learned does not make a lot of sense to me. Hopefully, somebody can
clarify this for me:

The SA attempted to restore a backup performed via HBOC BBACKUP command to a
bare system. The SAV commands used were SAVSYS, SAVLIB *NONSYS, SAVDLO, and
SAV. He said at the end, it failed. HBe spent several weeks in contact
with
IBM and was told that the individual commands did not include metadata,
required to bring the system back.

When I asked him what that data included, he got defensive and hostile. I
did
point out to the group a page from the infocenter indicating exactly what
was
saved by GO SAVE option 21. The SA then volunteered that even using GO SAVE
21
did not result in a functioning system, again due to missing metadata.

So, can anybody explain what is missing and how to fix it?

John McKee

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