Re-Registering a Proxy Server

SSH into the proxy server and run "/etc/init.d/initproxyappliance register"

It's faster than rebooting it and pressing a key when prompted from teh console.

Proxy Server Failing to Boot - fsck Failed

If you restart a proxy and it halts boot because "fsck failed for at least one filesystems" it's likely that there was a snapshot mounted when it rebooted and it's trying to mount that. Edit the proxy's settings in VMware and remove the snapshot (whatever disk is named differently than the proxy server). Once that's done you can can reboot the proxy and it should come up normally.


Make sure to delete the snapshot of the server that you removed from the proxy

Booting off of USB to install fresh DDOS when it is auto booting off of the local drives.

Installing fresh DDOS is done off of a USB drive. The EMC documentation just says to insert it, reboot, and it will boot off the USB drive. For me it bypassed the USB drive and booted normally. At least on my hardware it took pressing F11 at boot time to get an option to select the USB drive as the boot source.

Bandwidth Throttling Regular Client and VMware Image Backups

Bandwidth throttling a regular windows/nix client simply takes creating a file called avtar.cmd and placing it in the var folder where you installed the avamar client.

Edit the the file and add the following line:
--net-throttle=0.5
(where the 0.5 = how many mbps you are allowing the client)


Since there is no client installed on VMware image backups you can do it dataset wide. Edit the dataset, click the options tab, select the correct plugin (Windows/VMware Image), click more, and enter [avtar]throttle in the attribute field and the mbps value you'd like in the attribute value field. Then press the + button and hit okay. 

Configuring SNMP, Syslog, or Email alerting

Avamar can be set up to send SNMP traps, syslog notifications, or emails based on when event codes occur. This is configured under Tools - Manage profiles. Simply create a new profile and select the notification method you want.

As of version 7.1 SNMP and syslog do not provide enough information to be useful for VMware image backups (like client name). When integrating with an event management solution we were forced to parse emails.

If you want to be alerted of every backup failure or timeout select the following event codes

25004
30900
30901
30902
30910
30927
30932
30998
30999
31001
31013

Using PowerShell to Automate Avamar Tasks with SSH

I wanted to give our operations group the ability to execute various scripts or commands on the Avamar utility node without giving them direct SSH access. This can be accomplished using key based authentication, Plink, and powershell.

1. Download Plink and PuTTYgen from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
2. Use PuTTYgen to create your key pair. Save both the public and private key
3. Log onto the Avamar utility node and add the contents of the private key to the authorized_keys file in the ~user/.ssh directory.
4. Save the private key and Plink on the windows computer that you will be running the powershell scripts on. Protect your private key. Anyone that gains access to the file will have access to the utility node. 
5. Create your PowerShell script. In this example you need to set the variables for where the key and Plink reside, the full path to the private key, and the command you want to execute.
• $plinkfolder="C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY"
  $privateKey="C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\avamar_vmware_script_priv.ppk"
  $avamarunode="user@ahavmrun.ent.lolcentral.com"
  $Command="/usr/bin/java -jar /usr/local/avamar/bin/proxycp.jar --selectalldatastore"
  cd $plinkfolder
  ./plink.exe $avamarunode -ssh -i $privatekey $Command

Now anyone you give access to execute that script will be running  "/usr/bin/java -jar /usr/local/avamar/bin/proxycp.jar --selectalldatastore" on the utility node. Keep in mind that if they know what they are doing, can edit the file, or access the key, they can do whatever they want on the utility node.

Cleaning Up Snapshots mounted on Avamar Proxy Servers.

If you have a VMware image backup failing with the 10056 code and you can't consolidate snapshots on the VM because of a file IO lock chances are good you have a snapshot that's been left mounted on the Avamar proxy server.

You can either manually edit the Avamar proxy servers and remove any disks past the first two, or you can use the proxycp.jar utility to automatically clean them all up.

java -jar /usr/local/avamar/bin/proxycp.jar --listproxydisk --cleanup

will go though all of the proxy servers you have and unmount any snaps it left attached. I have run this while there was a VMware image backup running and it did not cause that backup to fail.