Environment
Novell Cluster Services
Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 (OES 2) Linux SP1
Situation
BackupExpress tape backup software would sometimes issue an error 1212 (access denied) when trying to backup clustered resources on OES2 sp1 Linux hosts. This was an NCS Novell cluster. This was a random error. Sometimes the same resources would backup fine. When the error occurred, SMS would return an FFFDFFD1 error which means ( no more data sets ) in the directory to be backed up. This was caused by the access denied problem. Tsafs debug logs showed that nss was denying access to the nss volumes. This problem never happened on Linux file systems. Nss does its own rights checking in addition to NDS. zOpen in nss would return a 0x517b error when the files were requested to be opened for backup. This would be passed up to SMS which returned the FFFDFFD1 error which then was passed up to BackupExpress which translated the error into 1212. Different users were tried as well with the same results. LUM was working fine on the Linux boxes.
Resolution
Placed NDS replicas on the cluster nodes that contained the users doing the backups as none of the cluster hosts had any nds replicas on them.