jherlitz's questions

I have backup exec 2010 R2. Going to be upgrading to 2012 here in the next day or two. I have several servers onsite and 4 remote servers. To backup the 4 remote servers to the tape library device I have takes way to long as it is slow over the connection and only one job runs at a time. Doesn't end nearly in enough time. So my solution was to backup all 4 remote servers to a disk folder. One folder for each site all listed under devices. I then have a final job of the night that backs up those folders to tape. All is well I thought, as all 4 remote sites backup at the same time, gets done fast as it is to disk.

Though, trying to restore data from a month or two back is proving to be a pain in the arse. I am currently struggling to recover some data. I have to inventory the tape, catalog it, then restore the disk folder, then inventory that, catalog that and look for the date and restore from it. Though, it is not working as smoothly as it should. Catalogs are failing and I am not getting the data.

There has to be a better way. Any suggestions on a better way to backup this data for easy recovery?

I am using Symantec Backup Exec 2010 in conjunction with an HP Storagewors 2024 tape library system. It used to compress the data well. As we are using 400/800gb tapes. For awhile now it is just going a 1:1 compression and is taking a lot of tapes.

I have contacted Symantec and they claim the tape library does the majority of the compression and to check on that. So not very much help.

I started contacted HP support last week, and I think my library is just out of warranty so will have to pay for support.

Any ideas of how I can get my data to start compressing again?

I am trying to get the group policy to work where after logon the user gets a message prompt. I've set the group policy, but the message doesn't show.

I first searched and seen another post with the same issue a year ago, but not sure it was ever resolved or 100% answered. So I would like to post this question again.

I did a GPresult and see the proper policy is being enforced.

I don't know why it isn't working. Any other suggestions.

What I would like to do is have a shortcut on the desktop of all users that takes them to a network folder containing files. Easy enough to do. The part I am wanting to add on is to set it for offline files. So the shortcut gets created and automatically gets added to offline files for sync during log on and log off without admin or user intervention.

Manually, easy enough to do, but I don't want to do manually 200 users. So I would like to use either our login script or group policy.

As I said, I know how to have the shortcut added easy through a script or gp, it's the automatically enabling it for offline files.

Any suggestions?

Okay, so I have 4 remote offices, all running off of a 3mb ethernet connection. Two sites are part of a WAN and 2 sites are using 3mb connections over a site to site tunnel.

I am using Backup Exec 2010, I have the remote agent installed on all the remote servers. For the past few weeks now, on the two sites running over the site to site tunnel have been failing with the following error message now.

"The network connection to the Backup Exec Remote Agent has been lost. Check for network errors"

We used to be on a DSL connection site to site tunnel, now we changed to the 3mb ethernet connection using site to site tunnel. I have to find out, has it been failing ever since we changed, or just recently.

Backup exec support is telling me it is a network issue. My communication or connection to the server is solid, we don't have any issues, or outages. So I am baffled on why this continues to fail. And why just those two sites..

Any advice?

Because of a mistake in adding disks earlier, I am going to rebuild my SAN. It is an HP MSA2000, and I am using 2 Windows Server 2008 servers in a cluster.

Please review my plan and let me know if I am on the right track.

I am going to backup fully all data on the SAN, including the Quorum. My plan is to shutdown both of the 08 servers in the cluster. Then remove the new disks from the SAN, followed by deleting the volumes, deleting the Vdisk. Once the volume and vdisk is deleted, I am going to recreate the Vdisk, and then recreate the volumes to match what I had before. My plan then was to boot up the the servers and hope that the config matches up yet and then restore the data.

As I type that, I realize, I will probably still have to delete the cluster from the 08 server and recreate everything there as well, as the data for the cluster still will not be there and most likely will not be recognized.

I am reading documentation and going over this in my head, however would like any advice from people better than me out there, or whom have done this before.

My plan is to start this Sat night and have it all back up and running Sunday sometime so Monday rolls around all users are ready to work.

Is it just me or is deleting all data on the SAN the most scariest thing and IT person can do? I swear I will check that backup job several times to make sure I have ALL data on it first!

So please any advice?

We had a power outage over the weekend due to some storms. All servers went down, and eventually came back up fine. All accept for one. Tried rebooting it, but took hours to apply computer settings and network settings before getting to the CTL ALT DEL screen.

Did login, but that as well took about 2 hours to finally reach the desktop. Digging around, 80% of services didn't start, cannot get to network properties, WSUS, any applications, cannot remote to it, etc

Dug around through event viewer but didn't find anything that would be of assistance to what is going on.

Yesterday, I was able to boot up into safe mode fine and quickly. Checked around then, but didn't find anything. Rebooted again and same results getting into windows normally.

I am looking for any suggestions.. Thank you. In the meantime, I am going to bounce it again and go into safe mode and see if I can run windows updates from safe mode.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions. This is my backup server so I need to get my backups running again...

We have a MSA2000. We had 7 146gb disks in them Raid 5. Created 1 virtual disk and I had 5 volumes. All 5 volumes added up to be around 817gb or so. Our "Data" folder was 805GB.

Recently we purchased qty 5 300gb disks to fill up the enclosure. My thought was we were going to just add the additional space to the existing virtual disk and volume and increase our storage by 1.2tb. So I did a virtual disk expansion and then did a volume expansion. Both took quite some time to process.

So, I go and look back now, and I first dorked up and added the additional space to the wrong volume, the volume I used for the quorum. Oops. Then realized, why when viewing the volume on the MSA it is only 735GB instead of 1.2tb? All the calculators out there say qty 5 disks at 500gb each at raid 5 will give me 1.2tb usable space.

So I was thinking first, how to I reverse these changes and just start over, and create a new virtual disk and a new volume. Couldn't figure out how. HP says I can't reverse the changes.

So my question is. WHAT are my options here? Also, any explanation on why it is only 735gb?

Oh one more thing, when I go onto one of my failover cluster management servers, and go into disk management, I cannot assign the disk space or work with it?

Basically I am having a hard time accepting loosing 465gb worth of storage...

Any advice would be great. Thanks all..

Okay, we have a SAN using Failover Cluster Management on a pair of 2008 servers. We created shares on here before and they are usable.

Now when I go to create a new share I get the following error message:

"Flags for the SMB Shared folder cannot be configured. This shared resource does not exist"

Does not allow me to create the share then.

Haven't been able to find any good docs out there to help me through this error.

Any advice would be appreciated.

So we setup a site to site vpn tunnel with another company. We then proceeded to setup a DNS zone on each others dns servers and entered in each others Mail server name and IP, MX record and WWW record. This allowed us to send emails to each others mail servers through the site to site vpn.

Now recently the other company started using MX Logic to scan all outbound and incoming mail. So all outbound email is directed to MX Logic.

However we still want email between us to travel across the the Site to Site VPN tunnel. How can we specify that to happen for just one domain not to be directed to MX Logic?

Stump on both ends and looking for help.

We use HP M4345 MFP's here with the HP DSS software. All the users can log into the MFP except for one particular user. I haven't been able to find out why. We are leaning towards her active directory account might be goofed. However I hate to delete the account and recreate it as it will cause a lot of extra work.

Looking for any advice before we have to proceed down that road.

We are running exchange 2007 in a domain environment. We have mostly outlook 2003 clients, but in process of upgrading to outlook 07 over the next couple of weeks.

Some users (both 03 & 07) are constantly getting prompted to enter their credentials. The 07 client I was working on this morning states "needs password" in the bottom right corner.

It is also speratic, as it will work fine most days but not some other days. The user I was working with this morning, has been working fine. Now it just started up today.

I have been googling this, and have found lot's of information, but nothing that has helped yet. A lot of the information out there is for outlook users using a external email account.

Being they already logged into the domain, these users should not be prompted for their credentials.

Any advice out there?

I have a user who we added an additional mailbox. They are keeping all emails coming into this, which in turn is increasing the size of the mailbox. So I created a PST file to store all the emails in. This user checks the mailbox's inbox and then moves them to the appropriate folder within the pst file. Well at least that is my theory.

However all the current folders in that additional mailbox have double end straight blue arrows. When we try to move the folder to the pst file we get the following error.

"Cannot move the items. Cannot copy this folder because it may contain private items"

I am certain it has to do with the blue arrows, so I am trying to determine what they are there for and how to remove. I have read comments on offline files, but offline files is disabled on this system. And I have also read comments on synchronization, but no luck.

Anybody else seen this before or come across this before?

Oh and by the way, this is office 2007 she is using.

I have a server with only a CD Rom drive. From what I can tell the bios doesn't allow booting to USB devices. I want to load an OS which is red hat linux. I have the bootable DVD for the OS/Software, but like I said I only have a CD Rom. I have created an ISO of that DVD.

Earlier I was given advice from members to do a pxe boot or network boot.

I have used bart PE to build a boot CD for purposes of ghosting. Can I build a bart PE disk that will point to a usb drive that has an ISO on it and kick it off?

Or what would be your best advice and directions for doing a network boot? I have never done that before, so there will be a learning curve for me.

I would like to do it with the least amount of effort, as this is just a side self training project I am doing.

The server is a DL320 G1 I believe, so it isn't the newest by any means, but it is just for testing and lab purposes so I don't need high end performance. I tried finding an updated bios for it to see if it would support booting to USB, but wasn't able to find one that would update the bios.

Looking for any advice that might help me out.

I have a bootable install DVD that I want to install on a older test server that only has a CD Rom. How can I copy that DVD onto multiple CD's in order to install.

This server is a DL320 which has a combo CD/Floppy which is scsi. I have tried to unplug it and plug in a IDE DVD rom with no luck. Won't boot to the ide dvd rom.

Tried ubuntu live CD and tried mounting the ISO, but haven't been able to get that to work.

My options I can come up with. Either purchase a new dvd/floppy combo, or get a way to burn that install dvd onto multiple CD's. I am trying to do this with no additional cost as I have enough into my lab equipment already.

Notes: DVD is an OS and application bootable DVD. So the CD has to be bootable as well. Also, I did create an ISO of it, so I can burn the CD from that.

So any advice on programs to do that?

We use Symantec backup exec 12. We don't feel it is necessary to backup the system state nightly. We are opting to back it up monthly or if system changes are made.

I have read articles on what exactly the system state back's up. From my understanding so far, even with the system state, one still needs to backup their whole C: drive and any other drive on the system to be able to perform a system restore.

We are backing up multiple servers to a compress 800gb tape. The question is, now we opted to only backup up the system state monthly, which saves us 80gb's per full backup, is it your opinion do we need to continue to backup the full C: drive nightly?

Note: We do a Weekly master and nightly incremental. The reason this question arises is that we hold out the weekly master, then a monthly returning the previous week into rotation, hold monthly until the year end is performed and then year end is saved for good and each month will eventually go back into rotation. Blah Blah I am rambling. Currently we are on two tapes per full backup. We were trying to get down to 1 tape, for convenience, but want to do the backups RIGHT!

What have other admins found as best practice?

We have DNS server running on our domain at our main site. We have 4 remote sites connected via a vpn. So we have a domain controller at each location. DNS server is setup on each of those servers as a secondary zone to the main DNS server at our main location.

Weird thing going on, on our main DNS server, it shows all the computers and IP's of the main site and only two of the remote sites. However, the two remote sites that are not showing up, it at least shows the server for each site.

Now if you go to the remote site server and look at that DNS server, it shows all 5 sites and their computers and IP's.

Why would our primary DNS server be missing the two sites?

Here is what I want to do.

We have a 12 tape changer in use. I created a media set called 7 day hold. So it will start putting all our backup jobs on a tape until it fills up and then moves on. Right.

Well what I want to do is hold out a weekly tape. So I have a weekly master and 3 other jobs that run on Friday night. I would like to specify that all those jobs go to a specific slot on the tape changer. As well as not allow any other jobs to go to that slot. That way, I know every week I have all the masters on one tape, I pull that tape and take offsite into our rotation.

Does that make sense? Now, how in the world do I do that.

Notes: The jobs I have running on Friday night are seperate jobs that only run on Friday nights. I want them all to go to one tape which can hold up to 800gb. I want all the nightly jobs to proceed through the slots as normal. I am using backup exec 12.

That is all I can think of.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

We are using HP laptops, and on them there is a software suite called HP Protect Tools. Part of this package of tools is "drive encryption." Since we are dealing with confidential information we enable drive encryption. It takes about two hours to encrypt the drive and then it requires you to enter a password upon booting up to get past the drive encryption. Then the bootup process continues to Windows.

Our issue is that once we encrypt the drive, if we ever go back and try to re-image the laptop, it appears to image fine, but when reboot we immediately error out and cannot boot up. We then have to rebuild from scratch.

I have tried to uncheck the drive encryption enabled box, but there is no results from that. Sure, the check box is unchecked, but that's it. I don't think it actually un-encrypts the drive.

We have tried to boot to a Windows XP DVD and start the install to get to the point of deleting the partition and creating a new one. However, that doesn't work either. We are out of thoughts at this point. We want to be able to re-image the laptops when needed.

Any guidance?

We have recently rolled out a web content filter. I have noticed on many users www.gravatar.com even though these users are not going to this site, nor have any program loaded that would connect to this site.

Anybody know why this would be showing up. Some google searching has mentioned possibly being attached to emails.

However, at this point, it isn't making sense.