Arcswerve weird folder warnings

[JamesWUK]

We have a problem which ocurrs on about two of our servers during their nightly backup. Weird symbols and letters are being appended before or after a valid directories causing Arcserve to flag a warning because the folder does not exist.

Eg.

NSSVOL1OST\OFFILES\FD9\<FILENAME>
in the backup log has become
NSSVOL1OST\OFFILES\FD9\ôÉà&#9559;\<FILENAME>

(I'm not sure if the weird characters will be displayed right, but they are different each time and usually consist of a foreign letter or letters that have accents or tilda's in them)
This then obviously gets flagged as E3011 Failed to open file.
The problem does not happen every night, some nights the backup runs through fine. When we do get the problem, it never happens on the same directory twice, but interestingly, it usually has something to do with GroupWise. It's favourite haunt seems to be the OFFILES folder, but it has been known to affect the OFUSER and even more interestingly, it has sometimes been found in some of the users GW archive folders which are stored on a completely different server in their home directories (these are being backed up by the same Arcserve session).
As there does not seem to be any kind of pattern here, it's pretty difficult to try and fix and CA have been about as useful as a chocolate teapot-none of their suggestions have worked.
Just wondered if anyone else had experienced a similar problem (probably not, but you don't know unless you ask!). It's Arcserve 6.6 SP2000.1 by the way!
Thanks
James Williams

 

[ArcserveFreek]

Hi,
I have some questions pertaining to this issue.

1. When did you start getting these wierd characters?
2. Have you observed these started happening after any specific change made to the server?
3. What is the version of Netware and service pack?
4. Is Groupwise running on a remote n/w server or local?

Thanks
ArcserveFreek &quot;Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.&quot;

 

[JamesWUK]

Apologies for not getting back to this-we've been having some major power outage problems which have been adversly affecting our servers and has blown our main UPS!

Anyway....

1-We've been getting the weird characters on and off since around the June 2002

2-Unfortunately, I cannot say for sure whether anything has been installed/updated on the affected servers as there are about 8-10 other techies that carry out work on these systems. I've asked around and none of them admit to anything. The only thing that gets updated regularly is the anti-virus software (Netshield 4.5) virus definition files.

3-It's Netware 5.1 running SP2. We're doing a feasability study into rolling out SP5, but someone heard that all 5.1 servers need to be patched at the same time. As we've got over 35 5.1 servers, this would be a big undertaking. We're going to test it out on a spare server to see if an individual update is OK

4-On one of the affected servers, there is a GW POA running locally. This is not the case on the others that exhibit this problem though. As mentioned previously, we have encountered the trouble when Arcserve was backing up a users GW archive which was on a server where no POA or MTA was running.

I've managed to dig up the suggestions that CA sent..

Hi,

While submitting the backup job from the manager select the following from
global backup options.
Backup manager-->options-->file method-->use lock mode if deny write fails
Backup manager-->options-->file retry -->retry after job
and Disable any antivirus running during backup
Please reply for any further assistance.
Regards,
Murphy (Venkatesh Murthy.K)

We've tried these suggestions, except for disabling the antivirus software. As we don't get the problem every time, we are reluctant to leave the virus software out of action for the time it could take to see if the problem was solved. Anyway, I would have thought that if the AV software was to blame, we'd get a problem every time.

I really appreciate any help or input you can give

James

 

[FormatC]

I have seen this before, something to do with the arcserve database. You could try the command line DBFIX but this could take several hours or several days depending on the size of the database.

I reinitialized the database and it was OK.

http://support.ca.com/techbases/as2000/as2k-1521.html