SUMMARY
Special considerations for characters and length when assigning names to your protected assets, backup copy targets, appliance configuration, etc.
ISSUE
You are creating a naming convention for your Unitrends appliance or have run into a problem with creating/modifying a name, backups, or restores.
Some assets will not save or report password errors.
RESOLUTION
If you run into a problem with using a name first make sure your appliance is up-to-date, many issues have been corrected in updates. The following considerations need to be kept in mind when making names in Unitrends:
When modifying AD settings
Active Directory Server - This field is limited to 15 characters. Follow DNS or NetBIOS naming conventions.
Protected Assets
In general, do not make names over 31 characters, and assets should be registered with their short DNS names and not FQDNs
CIFS, NFS, or SAN protected assets names cannot contain spaces
Backup copy targets
Third-Party Cloud bucket names:
Only upper and lowercase letters, numbers, dots, and dashes are supported
CIFS, NFS, or SAN Backup Copy Target names cannot contain spaces. SMB/CIFS and NFS specs both do not supprot a space in the DNS name OR share name. spaces in folders below the mount point are supportable but not in the mount address itself. UNC spec technically allows for this, but not the SMB/.NFS specs themselves.
non-UTF-8 characters
non-UTF-8 characters may cause issues for backup or restore, especially in an older Linux/Unix OS, Novel, or AIX
non-UTF-8 characters causing skipped files in a backup
non-UTF-8 characters causing problems with restore
For Linux systems you can run the following command to get lines with non-UTF-8 characters:
grep -n -P '[\x80-\xFF]' Mast_Apr_29-04_00_45.txt
For Windows systems you can perform these steps to find non-UTF-8 characters:
Run Powershell
Change to root of drive
Run:
gci -recurse . | where {$_.Name -match "[^\u0000-\u007F]"}
VMWare Name Length: 32 chrs on vmware 4.1 and lower, 63 characters on 5.x+, 80 characters on current releases. Note the "computername" value for a defined windows VM cannot exceed 15 characters in VMWare.
SQL
SQL databases with non-alphanumeric characters
SQL database names over 103 characters
Novell backups
Tilde "~" character in an exclude list breaks Novell backups, or files with over 400 characters
Solaris backups
File paths over 1024 characters
Password Restrictions
Some 3rd party systems, most notably VMWare in our product needs, may allow passwords for accounts to be used for direct login that are less restrictive than the password restrictions enforced by vendors to connect to to those systems via API or html commands. If you are receiving errors connecting an asset or updating a password for a prior saved credential, for the highest level of success, do not use passwords that contain non-ascii characters and seek to avoid characters that are used in HTML or curl string commands. This would include avoiding the following characters as a best practice: \ / " [ ] : | < > + = ; , ? * )( @ & or a trailing space
Additionally, many systems have password length restrictions in API calls. VMWare limits password lengths to 20 characters for example for vCenter Operations Manager and vAPI calls that we require, though user login to VMWare UI does not have this restriction.
NOTES
External links
UTF-8 characters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
Microsoft naming conventions in Active Directory for computers, domains, sites, and OUs: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/909264/naming-conventions-in-active-directory-for-computers-domains-sites-and
VMware length limits on names and descriptions: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2051649
VMWare Password Limitations for vAPI and Operations manager: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1037850