The Exchange Store service is not responding. 1

[Nkwe]

Hello everyone,

I have a customer running Backup Exec 8.6 and backing up Exchange 5.5. The problem is when the information store gets to a certain byte count, it comes up with an error saying "The exchange store is not responding. Backup set canceled"

I have checked permissions on the Exchange server and the BE service account has service account admin at the organisation and site level. The BE services are running under the correct NT account and Exchange admin is installed on the backup server.

The funny thing is the backup bombs out at this particular byte count each time it runs. I have appended the log file below.

Your help will be highly appreciated.

Thanks,
Nkwe


Unable to initialize Remote Agent for Windows NT/2000 - performing standard backup

Media Name: "Media created 1/8/2003 06:30:09 PM"
Backup of "\\GSCEXCHANGE\Microsoft Exchange Directory "
Backup set #285 on storage media #8
Backup set description: "Daily Full Mon to Thurs"
Backup Type: FULL - Database & Logs (flush committed logs)
Backup started on 1/21/2003 at 6:31:47 PM.

Backup completed on 1/21/2003 at 6:33:07 PM.
Backed up 1 Exchange Server store(s)
Processed 79,708,442 bytes in 1 minute and 20 seconds.
Throughput rate: 57.0 MB/min
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Unable to initialize Remote Agent for Windows NT/2000 - performing standard backup

Media Name: "Media created 1/8/2003 06:30:09 PM"
Backup of "\\GSCEXCHANGE\Microsoft Exchange Information Store "
Backup set #286 on storage media #8
Backup set description: "Daily Full Mon to Thurs"
Backup Type: FULL - Database & Logs (flush committed logs)
Backup started on 1/21/2003 at 6:33:09 PM.
The Exchange Store service is not responding. Backup set canceled.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^

Backup completed on 1/21/2003 at 9:48:53 PM.
Backed up 0 Exchange Server store(s)
Processed 12,594,446,428 bytes in 3 hours, 15 minutes, and 44 seconds.
Throughput rate: 61.4 MB/min

 

[Pirbright]

Hi Nkwe,

I've seen this problem before. The issue is not with BackupExec but with the Information Store database.
I suggest your customer runs the Exchange 5.5 utility Eseutil with the /G switch to check the integrity of the info store database. From the results your customer can then see if the db needs repairing (using the /P switch), recovering (using the /R switch) or defraging (using the /D switch).
Performing the above (depending on the size of the info store) will take a least a few hours, so best to plan this work out of hours. To understand more about this utility do a search in microsoft support for 'ESEUTIL Command line parameters'.
It will also be wise for the Remote agent to be installed onto the exchange server, this will make backups far quicker and also stop BackupExec moaning!!!
Hope this helps.

 

[Nkwe]

Hi Pirbright,

Thanks a lot for the insight. I will ask my customer to run the integrity checks over the weekend and I will let you know how it all went.

Nkwe

 

[Qdog]

The last post was excellent and right on target. Only thing I would add....run a backup using NTBackup locally on the Exchange server. If that errors out as well, call Microsoft.

Later...

 

[Nkwe]

We tried all MS Exchange database check utilities but we didn't get any joy from that. The customer rebuilt the Exchange server and ran the database checks once again and that did the trick.

Thanks for all your help.

Nkwe