NW4.11/Arcserve 6.1 problems...

[drallen]

We're running NW4.11, included in that where usign Arcserve 6.1 for our backups. Everything was fine til about 2-3 weeks ago. One night the server froze during backup. Not a problem, came in the next day down and restarted the server, no problem. Ever since then however I've been unable to get a backup process to run. I've done DSREPAIR's and VREPAIR's to try to eliminate the error message.

What happens is that the backup process starts, it makes a call to the antiviral program for a virus scan, completes the virus scan then gives an FAT error writing to the Arcserver activity log file. The message is Failed to Open Activity Log, <SERVERNAME>/SYS:Arcserve.6\arch$svr.log. It keeps attempt to access to activity log every few seconds... which of course means no one else is logging in while the server 'sits and spins'. Upon restart I'm able to go into Arcserve management and view the activity log no problem. I really hoped that the Vrepair would resolve the issue but it hasn't. I'm thinking of temporarily disabling the write to activity log piece and running the autopilot tonight just to see what happens. I'd appreciate any thoughts, suggestions, etc.

 

[TheLad]

First, check that your volume is not running low/out of diskspace. Next, check to ensure your backup user still has rights not only to the things it backs up but also to where Arcserve resides.

Let us know what your results are! -----------------------------------------------------
&quot;It's true, its damn true!&quot;
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[drallen]

The most frustrating part about this is that I've just been kinda thrust into this organization on my own. It's a small non-profit, and I came from a large corporation that had a full MIS department where server administration/maintenance was handled by our WAN Engineers... to a one-man shop. So this has been a learn on the job process... learned alot of good stuff... So if it looks like you are aking me questions that I don't know the answer to, but should, hopefully that's some explanation...but still... anyway let's continue.

Here's the new wrinkle Friday night I shutdown arcserve after changing the rights to the account (my own) to make sure it had the full rights necessary to rung the back that I log in to start the job with and failing to get it to run successfully earlier in the week. Checking the my PC friday night I see that at midnight a novell msg: Error reading both copies of the directory on FOODCOMM/SYS. was generated, followed by, Error writing FAT table for volume FOODCOMM/SYS. and then Error writing to the directory on FOODCOMM/SYS. closing with FOODCOMM TTS shut down

So now the problem whatever it is may not be strictly an arcserve problem... arcserve wasn't running when the above happened. So what caused the errors at midnight?

To say that I'm at wits end.....

 

[TheLad]

Sounds like a File System error. Do you know how the server is configured - a RAID configuration or mirroring?

Has the server come back up ok now and did it run a VREPAIR when it came back up? -----------------------------------------------------
&quot;It's true, its damn true!&quot;
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[drallen]

The server boots up fine. After that error message reboot of the server brings it right back up with no auto vrepair. Should I down it and run another vrepair on the sys volume?

 

[TheLad]

Might be worth finding out how the server is configured. This could be a mirroring issue, however it could be a FAT related issue. I wouldn't want to suggest you ran a VREPAIR without knowing the server configuration first as VREPAIR will usually run on server boot if it does discover any issues (usually that is!) -----------------------------------------------------
&quot;It's true, its damn true!&quot;
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