In a previous blog post, I discussed how much I liked the scheduled cloning operations introduced in NetWorker 7.6 SP1. Since then, I’ve had several people comment on it saying that while they’re able to manually start scheduled cloning operations, they’re not able to stop scheduled cloning operations in NMC – regardless of whether they were manually or automatically started.

Now I thought I’d been able to manually stop a scheduled cloning operation via NMC during beta testing, but I may have confused myself with something else, and when I noticed the same issue, it led me to think – can I stop this some other way, maybe from the command line? (For what it’s worth, the inability to stop a scheduled clone from NMC is a known issue, and there’s an EMC request running for it.)

It turns out without NMC, the command line is how you stop a scheduled cloning operation. It actually turned out to be fairly simple in the end. To do so, you use jobquery and jobkill.

First, use jobquery to identify the scheduled clone job you want:

# jobquery
jobquery> show name:; job id:; job state:
jobquery> print type: clone job; job state: SESSION ACTIVE:
                      job id: 64002;
                   job state: SESSION ACTIVE;
                        name: clone.linux clones;

Once you’ve got that job ID, all you have to do is quit jobquery, and run:

# jobkill -j jobID

In this case – it would be:

# jobkill -j 64002
Terminating job 64002

That’s it – that’s how you stop a scheduled clone job.

In a previous post, I described how one could use jobquery and jobkill to terminate running scheduled clones in situations where NMC doesn’t allow the clone to be stopped from within the GUI. However, jobquery isn’t necessarily the most intuitive of interfaces if you’re not using it all the time.

I was pleasantly surprised when I was preparing some documentation to note that jobkill, as of 7.6 SP2, has become interactive if there are multiple jobs running, which reduces the need to run jobquery if you’re wanting to just stop one scheduled operation.

In 7.6 SP2, if you run jobkill without any arguments, and there are jobs running, you’ll run into an interactive session such as the following.

# jobkill
                      job id: 3104018;
                        name: tara-5;
                        type: savegroup job;
                     command: ;
           NW Client name/id: ;
                  start time: 1312763880;
------------------------------------------------------
                      job id: 3104025;
                        name: /d/01;
                        type: save job;tara.pmdg.lab
                     command: 
save -s tara.pmdg.lab -g nox-5 -LL -f - -m tara.pmdg.lab -t 1312026303 
-l 5 -q -W 78 -N /d/01 /d/01;
           NW Client name/id: tara.pmdg.lab;
                  start time: 1312763880;
------------------------------------------------------
                      job id: 3104026;
                        name: /;
                        type: save job;
                     command: 
save -s tara.pmdg.lab -g nox-5 -LL -f - -m tara.pmdg.lab -t 1312026306 
-l 5 -q -W 78 -N / /;
           NW Client name/id: tara.pmdg.lab;
                  start time: 1312763880;
------------------------------------------------------
Specify jobid to kill ('q' to quit, 'r' to refresh): 3104018
Terminating job 3104018
Specify jobid to kill ('q' to quit, 'r' to refresh): q

So there you go – jobkill is interactive, helpful and now saves the hassle of running jobquery first.