Frustrating SAN

[stonetown]

OK, this has been ongoing for at least 3wks in two locations with no end in sight, has anyone else experienced the following:

Two NT4.0 SP5 servers
Both connected to Compaq fibre channel hubs and shared storage
One Compaq Modular Data Router connected to the fibre hubs
One Compaq TL891 tape library (10 slots) connected to the Modular Data Router.
All the hardware works fine and seems to be configured correctly.

Arcserve 2000 SP4 & Device SP (AE, TLO, SANO) on each server.

2 servers are configured as primary and distributed, everything runs fine on the primary server, there are two groups that are configured for the tape library that split the slots, Group1 for slots 0-4, Group2 for slots 5-9.

When the distributed server is brought online and connects to the primary server, it can see the groups and the Tape Library OK and everything seems normal, but when a backup is configured on the distributed server(and uses one of the groups), the backup will halt with a 'can't find tape error', or sometimes a 'can't find group error'.

The primary and distributed servers can be swapped around but whichever is the distributed server it will exhibit the same behaviour.

Any help appreciated.

 

[jabus]

stonetown,

A couple of things to check/try:

Verify that the two are using the same Domain Account, and have appropriate permissions and rights. Also check that this account has full permissions to the [arcserve$] share.

On the distributed node, stop all the engines. In the registry, navigate to HKLM\Software\ComputerAssociates\ARCServeIT\Base. Delete the TapeEngine key. When you restart the tape engine, it will pull the configuration information from the primary server.

I've seen where there is extraneous information in the tapeengine key relating to device groups, and this sometimes clears it up.

Check to make sure that the Removable Storage Service has been disabled. Also check the Device Configuration on the primary to verify the equipment (# of drives, barcode, etc.).

 

[YoMamaSoFat]

You may also want to make sure that each server is in the others host file.

YoMama.....

 

[Stacy12]

May also want to ensure that the firmware is supported by Arcserve...simliar issue and we had to down grade firm ware(nightmare)....good luck

 

[stonetown]

LOOKS LIKE IT'S FIXED.

Only 14 weeks after they released the dreaded SP4 do CA release a patch to fix this specific problem, for anyone interested it is patch QO28915. The device update fixes the distributed server problem of not being able to 'pull' the Group settings from the primary server, however, at first it may appear that the patch has not worked, but with a bit more patience I discovered that once the patch has been applied, then, on the distributed server, you may need to click on device group configuration in device manager and click OK before the group settings are registered on the distributed server correctly.