Data Protector reporting with Navigator through a firewall

Data Protector has a number of built-in reports, which you can email, put on an intranet, pipe through some other command and various things like that. I wrote up the complete list of built-in reports here:
http://blog.ifost.org.au/2015/04/data-protector-built-in-reports.html

HP's strategic direction for reporting appears to be Backup Navigator. It is licensed purely on the capacity of the cells it is reporting on. (In other words: how big is a full backup of all the data being backed up: that's the capacity you license on.)

It produces some nice reports:

I was working with a customer who had had some problems with connectivity on Navigator 9.1.

Their cell managers had an omnirc file which limited the number of ports open for connections.

OB2PORTRANGESPEC=CRS:20495-20499

Having only five ports open was enough for them. We organised to have ports 20495 - 20499 opened from their Navigator server to their cell manager.

As it turns out, this is not enough. You need to have connectivity open from the cell manager back to the Navigator server as well. This isn't documented anywhere, and there's no error report from Navigator about this.

This problem goes away somewhat in Navigator 9.21 and 9.3 because you can do agent-based push. This is where you run a program on your cell manager which connects to Navigator on port 443 (HTTPS) and uploads the information that Navigator needs.

This solves the problem in two ways:

• With the new agent model, there's no need to open anything from the Navigator server to the cell manager, so you can put the Navigator server in a quite isolated network.
• It's entirely possible to run the Navigator server in the cloud (HPE offer a three month trial) and have your Data Protector reporting handled by a third party.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector