Installing the Arcserve Exchange agent

This is pretty straight forward to INSTALL but Arcserve itself is bound to get you somehow.

1) You need to create a mailbox for the agent. What the agent DOES is to pass all of the mail it backs up through this single mailbox. Its best to use an exchange admin account as the primary NT account for it.

2) Run the setup program. You need to give the prog the agent's mailbox alias name, and also your exchange service account name. You'd use the same admin account to login to the agent from Arcserve backup server and can even use it as the account to startup the backup agent services as well.

3) Once the agent is installed, you need to run REGIT, the program that works if you're lucky. Regit wants your reg # for the agent and should hopefully generate license keys. Always look at your eventviewer in NT *AND* at your regit.log, license.log, etc files in the CA_LIC dir where you install the agent. They often can tell you valuable info. The product.dat in CA_LIC is viewable via notepad for product numbers that come up in CA error codes in license logs.

4) Don't run McAfee Groupshield 4.5. Yes it doesn't work in Groupshield 4.5 with Arcserve (earlier GS does work though). What shame, I'm sure CA is crying over that. We had to switch to other virus software because of these jerks. NA of course is useless.

5) Disable circular logging of transaction logs. Unless you're back is against the wall on disk space on the exchange server (cough, get an external array controller, etc). Take it from Microsoft- they bluntly mention circular logging is for the cheap bastards out there as a tip of the MS hat. Anyone really not wanting to shoot themself during disaster recovery turns off circular logging. You can also right click on the exchange agent in the Arcserve backup server and set the log file handling options. The default is to delete unneeded log files.

6) Set the IS maintainence exchange performs to occur NOT when the backup is running. EG, set the backup to run just after business hours, say 8pm. It should finish maybe early morning, say 4am? Then set the maintainence to run from 6-7am, etc. It doesn't take all that long for exchange to (attempt to) clean itself up, maybe less than an hour. But give yourself a buffer in case the backup runs slower. If users start getting their mail during the maintainence cycle, it's no big deal. User's getting mail during a backup can be much slower. Just an FYI.

7) CLEAN THE AGENT MAILBOX! The agent mailbox passes the entire IS from exchange thru itself. You need to do a "clean mailbox" every few days at the most. Or else...mystery errors. Yee Haw.

8) Look for the mystery reg key and fix if necessary:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ComputerAssociates\ARCserveIT\DSAgent\CurrentVerrsion\Agent\dbaexch needs to be
UseTCP: REG_DWORD: 0x0, not 0x1. This causes the backup agent to give errors like "cannot send (or recieve) data from (to) client agent". I fixed this only recently with the help of Arcserve on a fresh and properly service-packed install. Apparently this can happen to any version of the exchange agent...

9) DESELECT ADMIN MAILBOXES! When setting up the job on the backup server, make certain to uncheck all users that get deleted from exchange. This causes errors. Also, do not backup any mailboxes bricks level that are: a)The agent mailboxes themselves. b) administrator mailboxes c)AntiVirus agent mailboxes. 4) You get the idea.

10) Set the job pre-post up to notify you when it fails. Exchange backups tend to have problems usually admins not unselecting deleted mailboxes, etc.

Some other tips would be to set deleted items retention to 30 days (so you never have to use an arcserve backup to restore.). Also, test and restore to disaster recovery server with a full info store backup (you'll have a blast, trust me) and rebuild the server. You'll need a PDC with current SAM to do this and it's best done on a seperate network.

Set the DR mail server up with proper LMHOSTS to find the PDC and have at it rebuilding your mail server. Don't be surprised if this takes DAYS depending on your setup and proficiency level. Also, test some mailbox restores as well. No one likes to wait for that urgent restore!

The agent is EASY to set up. But as you can see, 10 lengthy tips are had because there's a lot more to it than any Arcserve product support person or instruction manual can help you understand. #8 is my personal favorite. Enjoy!

Peter Turek (power_pete@hotmail.com)