Collecting system information with SYDI

I have been using SYDI for quite a while now. The 2.0 release of sydi-server has added some nice features, the ability to generate Word output from .xml files is huge. The only think that I found to be annoying is that the sydi-transform.vbs script does allow the input of an entire directory.

cscript.exe sydi-transform.vbs -xServer.xml -sServerhtml.xsl -oServer.html

This can make the transformation process from .xml to .html fairly labor intensive for a large environment. This little script solves that problem.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# syntax: perl transform.pl dir_where_xml_files_live
# e.g. – perl transform.pl ./xmlfiles
# Will walk the file system and output filename.xml.html for each .xml file
#
# Edit these variables to match the location on your system
$pathtotransform=”g:/sydi/tools/sydi-transform.vbs”;
$pathtoxsl=”g:/sydi/xml/serverhtml.xsl”;

#DO NOT EDIT BELOW THIS LINE
$dirtoget=”$ARGV[0]”;

opendir(IMD, $dirtoget) || die(“Cannot open directory”);
@thefiles= readdir(IMD);
closedir(IMD);

foreach $f (@thefiles)
{
unless ( ($f eq “.”) || ($f eq “..”) )
{
system “cscript $pathtotransform -x$f -s$pathtoxsl -o$dirtoget\/$f.html”;
}
}

W2K3 Recovery using EMC Legato Networker

A few months ago I had a customer who was having some problems doing a full system restore of a Windows 2003 Server with EMC Legato Networker 7.2.1 –  The EMC Legato Networker folks told the customer that a full system restore was not supported and the Legato Networker was only able to backup and restore files not applications (I know this sounds ridiculous – but it is true).  Over and over EMC support continually stated that Legato only supported  Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) by using the ASR (Automated System Restore) capability inherent in W2K3.  The irony in all of this is that the customer was not attempting a BMR.  The customer merely wanted to do a full restore to a W2K3 host.  While the customer was out of luck due to the fact that EMC Legato would not provide support and they were uncomfortable with an unsupported configuration I took it upon myself to test this scenario.  I have been meaning to do this test and document it for a while but my time is limited.  Thank goodness for holidays and vacation time 🙂

I ran the same test 5 times with the same results. IT WORKED EVERYTIME… I am not sure what the problem is here – maybe just communication.  I would be interested in feedback from anyone having problems doing this or anyone who has done this successfully in production.  Also if you have had similar issues with EMC Legato support I would be interested hearing about them.