Backup Woes
Articles and Tips: qna
01 Oct 2002
Q.
I am having problems running Veritas' Backup Executive (BE) 9 on NetWare 6. These could simply be isolated problems that only show up with certain hardware configurations, but I always seem to run into problems nobody has ever heard of.
I have been using BE 8.x in production for a long time with no problems. Recently, in preparation for a migration to NetWare 6, I installed a new backup server running BE 9. The backup server simply crashes, but it doesn't do it on any regular basis, and it does not appear to be specific to any particular server it is backing up. The BE job log file shows a lot of gobblety- gook ASCII characters at the time of crash.
I have made support calls to Veritas for this and various other incidents in my attempts to stabilize the system. Veritas tells me this is a problem with either the server hardware or the SCSI adapter.
As an additional note, I run an autochanger and have found that when a job requires more than one tape, operator intervention is often required, even though I have tried to automate this. Veritas has given me some patches that seem to help to overwrite existing tapes, but these problems have been errati.c.
Given all the software and patches problems I've had, I am not so quick to focus on the server or the SCSI adapter, but I do agree the hardware needs investigation. Can you give me any other ideas on this?
Backing Up with Beethoven
A.
Dear Backing Up: I am using BE 9 on a Netfinity 5500 server with an Adaptec SCSI card running NetWare 5. I also have an DLT autochanger. After some initial experimentation, I have gotten it to work pretty nicely. I still receive some errors occasionally but, for the most part, it takes care of itself.
Most of the problems I had after initialization were caused by SCSI bus errors. These were corrected by making some changes in the SCSI BIOS. There is documentation on Veritas' Web site that lists some modifications you can make if you are getting SCSI bus timeouts and the like. (The main thing that helped me was changing the synchronization rate to its lowest setting [5 mb/s].)
The garbage characters in your logs makes me suspect either corrupted software or flaky hardware. I would lean toward the latter, given you probably have already re-installed the software--not to mention the patches they have given you.
I initially had problems with BE 9 connecting to the server until I realized that BE 9 uses different configuration files and different configuration programs than BE 8. If you upgrade your backup server and don't remove the BE 8 files first, they will remain there and will continue to work. You can happily run the old configuration program and it will write to the old configuration files, which, of course, won't do anything. If you are working off of an upgraded copy, you might want to try removing BE 8 entirely and then re-installing BE 9.
* Originally published in Novell AppNotes
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