Survey on omniabort extensions in Data Protector

Sometimes, a Data Protector session will hang. The backup session manager (bsm) process doesn't exit even though all the disk agents and media agents have long since finished. I wrote a blog post about it (http://blog.ifost.org.au/2014/05/how-to-kill-hanging-session.html), including how to fix it, but Tara F asked if there's a way of killing the BSM process and leaving the status of the session as "Completed".

As far as I know, there isn't.

I wrote:

Maybe we should lobby for this as a feature request -- if a bsm receives (say) SIGUSR1 then it should quit and report a successful session. Or perhaps there should be a -kill option to omniabort which can say whether it was a good ending. 

e.g.
omniabort -kill -ok

500 people have read the "How to kill a hanging session", almost all of whom came in via Google searches to that page. This suggests it's a reasonably common problem. So I wondered if we could try something a little different: what if we lobbied HPE for this feature?

Normally, the right thing to do is to log a feature request under your support call. Do this for any really important stuff. But this is a small request that will make a small amount of difference to a large number of customers, so I'm interested to see if this works.

Here's the survey, with three questions: 

• Do you want omniabort -kill?
• Do you want omniabort -kill -ok?
• Can HPE get a copy of the session report automatically when you use these?

[Google Form Survey]

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HPE DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HPE and HPE 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, or visit the online store for Data Protector products, licenses and renewals at http://store.data-protector.net/