VERITAS Software

[Stangfriik]

Any of you IT guys use VERITAS Products? I'm watching the webcast where they are introducing their new products. NetBackup 5.0 increased backup speed 78% and restore speed 30%. Plus with all the new features such as Command Central, the ability to backup desktops and laptops company wide, plus many other options, VERITAS will attain even higher market share in Backup and Recovery. They are also intorducing Backup Exec 9.1 for Windows Servers which will hopefully get rid of the bugs in 9.0.

 

[the nature boy]

love their software, but buy the software from a reseller. dealing with them directly is a pain. the support is so-so as well.

 

[XBiker]

Used it in the past.

Pretty good setup, flexible, and good network backup functionality.

It would get a little frustrating at times, but that's true for a lot of software.

 

[NoDaddyNo]

We use BackupExec 9.0 and it fails on us all of the time. There is a memory leak in it so I wrote a script that starts the processes right before it starts backing up every night and then kills the processes when it is done.
Otherwise it kills the machine (at low processor loads oddly enough) every day.
This is supposedly a known issue with the Dell PowerEdge servers of our type and Win 2K with 9.0 of BE on it.

It currently is randomly finishing or not finishing the backups, but not telling us about it either way - this started once our enterprise anti-virus solution was put into place.

We are adding in 3 external drives and going to ghost and backup entire machines in a fraction of the time and have the backup geographically distributed as well in case of natural disaster.

The products that I can't stand since they are what I spend 95% of my time dicking with:
Exchange 2K on Win2k with sp4 - you need to drop back to sp3 and remove certain patches or there is a memory leak in the store.exe process and your machine will need to be rebooted about once a week.

WinFax - this program eats ass and the support for it sucks. It is good for straight up faxing, and that is about it. Any other feature is useless on it and it is a spastic program.

Backup Exec for the reasons I said above.

HP printers. I have had many of them and never had issues - but in the workplace they are a nightmare for some reason - at least here they are. Their support is at least okay if you have new hardware.

Xerox Document Centre 432ST - this thing takes weekends of my life. This thing sucks huge hairy nuts. It is terrible and uses FTP and/or Netware - I can only hope that it is an old system and the newer ones actually work better (faster) over Windows networks and not have to use FTP.

The way that Windows handles mapped drives if the domain controller that it is paired with restarts.

Those are pretty much the issues that I spend entirely too much time on. I have a few Windows networking issues that nobody even believes when I explain it to them. Then when they go to look at it, they see it and then usually run away never to come back.
We have outside domains somehow getting in and failing to connect properly and it is showing up in our firewall and our error logs - yet nothing about our physical network allows that and I disabled out one weak wireless connection.

 

[jnuts]

There was a thread on Slashdot about backup software and some folks talked about Veritas stuff. Like NDN, they did not likee it too much.

 

[jnuts]

We have outside domains somehow getting in and failing to connect properly and it is showing up in our firewall and our error logs - yet nothing about our physical network allows that and I disabled out one weak wireless connection.

Do you have any kind of VPN access at work?

What about dudes that hookup laptops to your wired network?

 

[NoDaddyNo]

Do you have any kind of VPN access at work?

What about dudes that hookup laptops to your wired network?

We have one VPN setup. A dedicate link between one specific server in our office and one at one of our clients offices.
That connection so far has never been used except during setup (I monitor it).

There are three laptops in our office - now four with my new laptop. I own two of the laptops, and another Mac guy has one, and then a new guy has a Windows machine.
While he is a major pain in my ass, he isn't the issue since he is very new and the problems have been there since before I have.

The domains that they are failing on are legit domains of companies in town. We are on a frame relay system - I don't know if they are also on a frame relay system and perhaps also go through our provider.
The security logs show it as if someone was in our domain and trying to log into a different domain - but they aren't hacking (or if they are, they are the most retarded hackers I've ever seen).
It looks exactly as if I brought in a machine and tried to log in to one domain with a machine setup as another.
Except these machines are not physically in our office. It is a small enough office that I can be sure of that.
Very bizzarre - and some of the machines are servers.

Our firewall blocks pretty much everything - for a bit we had an RDC port open that directed to our primary domain controller. I shut that off since I don't have a static IP.
In the logs for our firewall, it knows that it is supposed to only allow a fixed range of IPs to use it - but it will still sometimes show that one of our highest bandwidth users is some IP that is a different domain.

The whole thing is making me feel stupid and makes everyone else tell me that it is impossible... which is what I've been saying all along - but I also have the logs that say otherwise.

 

[Stangfriik]

Yea Backup Exec 9 was pretty buggy. I know a lot of the probs were from users inexperience with the new interface (not saying you are one of them just that a lot were). 9.1 is supposed to fix a lot of the issues plus bring a really nice new features. But build 4454 was supposed to fix most of the build 4367 also so I'm not sure. Netbackup is where a lot of the goodies are but something that complex isn't really needed unless you are backing up globally. All in all with VERITAS grabbing 85%+ market share and being the number 5 largest software company in the world, They must be doing something right.

 

[NoDaddyNo]

All in all with VERITAS grabbing 85%+ market share and being the number 5 largest software company in the world, They must be doing something right.

That would very likely be their partnership with MS.

 

[the nature boy]

That would very likely be their partnership with MS.

yeah but they have partnerships with oracle, emc, and sun if I'm not mistaken

 

[IHateBrolies]

I used to work for Veritas. They treat their employees very well.

I remember that NetBackup was rather buggy, especially in non-English localized versions due to old non-internationalized code. They need to invest more into modularizing their code and fixing bugs.

I remember that there was some scandal with the new CEO after I left, and I didn't pay any attention to it after that. I know that he had inflated hopes of increased revenue for that coming year.

 

[justyxxxx]

I don't use Veritas, I use Computer Associates and I rarely ever experience backup issues. CA works with Linux and Microsoft for sure, but others too . . .