six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2020-06-25

Barracuda Backup Agent for Linux Unattended Installation (Update)

This is a brief update to my previous post Barracuda Backup Agent for Linux Unattended Installation. In recent versions the name of the actual installer binary has changed to UiConsole. The problem and solution remain the same, though.

Download and unpack the archive, then run

echo '/opt/barracuda' | ./lin/$(uname -m)/UiConsole

to install the agent to a different directory. To uninstall run

echo 'u' | ./lin/$(uname -m)/UiConsole

Note that uninstallation leaves an auto-generated SSL certificate in the directory <installdir>/config, so you need to clean up manually afterwards. Also, the public download location for the agents has apparently been removed. Now you need to download the agent from the Cloud Control web UI (System → Software-Downloads).

Posted 21:32 [permalink]

2020-05-23

Barracuda Backup Reports Missing Drive

Barracuda Backup reports show a warning when the Windows agent cannot find a drive that is supposed to be backed up:

A Volume (drive) that was previously backed up is no longer there and being backed up.: Removing volume X: because it no longer exists.

The vendor documentation has an article that describes how to bring the missing drive back online. But what if the drive was removed on purpose and people just forgot to adjust the backup configuration first? You can't simply change the backup configuration to ignore the drive after the fact, since the drive is already absent and thus cannot be de-selected.

See more ...

Posted 11:05 [permalink]

2015-12-31

Barracuda Backup Agent for Linux Unattended Installation

Barracuda Networks provide agents for their backup appliance for various operating systems. Unfortunately the Linux agent (unlike the Windows agent) does not come with an option for a silent installation, and it doesn't look like the vendor can be bothered to do anything about it.

Instead of being able specify a path on the commandline (or at least force a silent installaton to the default path) you're always prompted for the path where the agent should be installed:

/tmp # tar xzf barracuda_backup_agent-x.x.x.tar.gz
/tmp # cd barracuda_backup_agent-x.x.x
/tmp/barracuda_backup_agent-x.x.x # ./install
Please choose an installation path, or press enter for default.
[/usr/local/barracuda/bbs]: _

See more ...

Posted 01:13 [permalink]

2015-03-12

Repairing a Suspect msdb Database

Sometimes a situation arises where an SQL Server instance comes back up with a database tagged as "suspect". Apparently there is a number of possible causes for this, like transaction log corruption, insufficient memory or disk space, or unexpected shutdowns due to hardware or power failure. In our case the reason was probably a hardware failure, since the database resides on an iSCSI volume, and we were making changes to our iSCSI network. And to make things a little bit more interesting, our msdb database just had to be among the affected databases.

See more ...

Posted 19:07 [permalink]

2014-03-26

Cleanup of DB2 Backups Fails with Return Code 136

Recently I encountered a rather weird problem with the cleanup of backups of some of our DB2 databases. The database backups are done via TSM by running the following command:

db2 "backup db DBNAME online use tsm"

Cleanup of obsolete backups is done by running the following commands via a scheduled task.

db2adutl delete full older than TIMESTAMP db DBNAME without prompting
db2adutl delete logs between S0000000.LOG and S(xxxxxxx-1).LOG db DBNAME without prompting
db2 "connect to DBNAME"
db2 "prune history DATE and delete"
db2 "prune logfile prior to Sxxxxxxx.LOG"
db2 "connect reset"

Sxxxxxxx.LOG is the oldest log of the oldest backup to be kept, which is extracted from the output of db2adutl query full db DBNAME. S(xxxxxxx-1).LOG is that log number minus one.

Although this setup had been working for several years without problems and no changes were made to the system, the log cleanup step suddenly started to fail for some databases while it still worked fine for the others.

See more ...

Posted 21:10 [permalink]

2013-10-09

Process Explorer Error: .NET Performance Counters Are Corrupt

Today I encountered the following error message on one of my servers (running Windows Server 2008) when I started Process Explorer:

The .NET performance counters on this system are corrupt. Run Exctrlst from the Microsoft Windows Resource Kit to repair them.

See more ...

Posted 11:58 [permalink]

2013-06-20

PrintBrm Error 0x8007007b

Running the following command for backing up a printserver configuration

"%SystemRoot%\System32\spool\tools\PrintBrm.exe" -B -S server -F "C:\path\to\backup.pbk"

gave me an error after listing the printer ports:

The following error occurred: 0x8007007b.
The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.

Check the eventlog for detailed information about the error which occurred.

Turns out, PrintBrm doesn't seem to like double quotes around the backup file name, at least not on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. I changed the command line to

"%SystemRoot%\System32\spool\tools\PrintBrm.exe" -B -S server -F C:\path\to\backup.pbk

and the backup ran without issues.

Posted 16:15 [permalink]

2013-03-12

TSM BA Client 6.4 on Debian

Although IBM doesn't officially support its TSM client on Linux distributions other than SLES and RHEL the client works quite nicely on Debian. With version 6.4 you need at least the following 4 packages on AMD64 systems:

  • TIVsm-BA
  • TIVsm-API64
  • gskcrypt64
  • gskssl64

See more ...

Posted 00:46 [permalink]