Administering mixture of Retro 8 & 9 servers?

[fredturner]

I looked through the 4 pages of Retrospect 9 posts here and several pages of Retro 8 posts, but did not find the answer to this. As a consultant, I maintain several Retrospect servers for my clients via the Console app on my MacBook Pro. I have thus far avoided upgrading them and myself to v9, as I didn't (and still don't) feel it fair to require exorbitant upgrade fees combined w/ an unproven track record for a mere bug-fix release of a highly unstable previous product.

 

But short of another option, and hoping that things improve now that Retrospect, Inc. is on its own, I'm sure I will have a need to set up and manage a Retro 9 server in the near future. However, I'm not about to recommend that all of my existing v8 customers upgrade at the same time, meaning I will have a mixture of v8 & v9 servers to administer. From my brief look a while back at the initial v9 release trial, it did not appear that it would allow control of a v8 server-- IIRC, it immediately prompted to upgrade the v8 server and wouldn't control it otherwise. What's more, w/ v9 wanting to update Console prefs from v8 on each launch, retaining both versions of the Console did not seem possible.

 

Is this still the case? If so, does anyone have a clever way of managing a heterogeneous mix of v8/v9 servers? One of the big draws to me of v8 was this ability to remotely control multiple servers, so I'm not interested in a solution that requires managing each one via Apple Remote Desktop or something like that.

 

Thx,

Fred

[fredturner]

Okay, I've done a bit of testing w/ the latest v9.0.2 Console, and it does appear that I can access a v8 Server. This testing only includes taking an initial look at the v8 Server settings and ongoing operations-- not a full functionality test. Can anyone confirm or deny that a v8 Server can be successfully administered *error-free* using the v9 Console? Any gotchas?

 

Thanks,

FT

[fredturner]

Hmmm...well, so much for that. The v9 Console blew out my chosen Media Sets and Schedules when I selected a nightly script to view. Had a momentary lift in my attitude toward Retrospect these days, but now that seems out the window. I can't imagine that Retro 9 has been designed w/o the ability to administer a Retro 8 Server. A better example is Apple's Server Admin-- although Apple is phasing it out in favor of the less capable but Grandma-friendly Server.app, it can administer Mac OS X Servers all the way back to 10.5 Leopard Server.

 

Am I the only one administering multiple backup servers?? The multi-server-remote-Console was one of the key selling points of Retro 8 to me. If I have to go back to using Remote Desktop to administer servers remotely, I may as well revert to Retro 6 as well-- at least it was relatively lightweight, responsive, and not so fraught w/ bugs.

 

Sigh,

FT

 

P.S. I should also mention that Console 9 yanks the settings from Console 8, and then does not leave them for v8 to use anymore. Launching Console 8 again results in a blank window, waiting for you to add servers. Hmph.

[Don Lee]

Although I did not get a lot of experience with this setup, I briefly had both v8 and v9 engines, and had both the v8 and v9 consoles installed on the same machine to control them. I did not notice any major issues with this setup, as long as I made sure to use the right console with the right engine.

[twickland]

Although I did not get a lot of experience with this setup, I briefly had both v8 and v9 engines, and had both the v8 and v9 consoles installed on the same machine to control them. I did not notice any major issues with this setup, as long as I made sure to use the right console with the right engine.

We found this to be sort of true. Retro 8 and 9 use the same Config80.dat file, so in switching from one to the other we needed to keep swapping the v8 and v9 license codes to match the version we were running. I wouldn't find this to be very convenient over the long haul; it might even be slightly easier to swap a pair of Config80 files.

 

We never experimented to see if Retrospect can function with Config80 in some path other than /Library/Application\ Support/Retrospect, which might allow one to maintain two copies of the file, one for each version.

[fredturner]

I have submitted this bug report/feature request to Retrospect support as well, and have gotten some dialogue going there. I won't hold my breath, but the person responding to me said he/she would submit it as a feature request (but didn't hold out a lot of hope for that). It was also suggested that I create alternate Mac OS X user accounts for running each version of Retrospect. I replied that I thought this was an "absolutely awful" solution. If nothing else, at least let me run both Consoles in my normal account w/o them maiming each other's setups. Preferably, include v8 code as a module inside the v9 Console so that it can handle both v8 and v9 engines.

 

I realize my need/setup is not extremely common, but part of the beauty that was supposed to be w/ v8 is the ability to remotely administer multiple servers. I have done this (albeit w/ the headaches of v8) quite extensively-- right now I have 8 different clients' Retrospect servers in my Console. Now, since I have taken this ability to a relative extreme, I have ironically made it so that upgrading any of them or adding a new one will be quite difficult, since v8 and v9 don't play together (and since convincing every single client to upgrade to v9 at the same time-- or at all-- is clearly not possible).

 

twickland, I might try your idea of repositioning the Application Support directory and Config80.dat file. But....really?? Why must they use the same exact file?? Couldn't v9 create Config90.dat??

 

FT

[Don Lee]

Actually, this would be an easy fix for Retrospect. Use Config90.dat for 9.x, and Config80.dat for 8.x. When installing 9.x, copy over Config80 -> Config90. They could put that in a bugfix release in 9.x. It's not beautiful, but it would allow the 8.x and 9.x consoles to co-exist without fighting.