[Networker] Strange NDMP behavior

I am having a strange problem using NDMP to back up Mirapoint emailservers via NDMP 3. This problem began on May 11 when the operatingsystem on our eight Mirapoint email servers was upgraded to MOS3.7.5a-GA. We run NetWorker 7.2.1 on a Sun Solaris 9 box and prior tothis Mirapoint OS upgrade, our NDMP backups worked fine. Now, I amgetting very strange things happen.

Our eight Mirapoint message stores hold anywhere from 10GB of emailup to about 500GB and all are behaving the same weird way. For theservers with a large amount of data, the backup takes more than 24hours to complete ... I think. I am seeing errors show up that saysthat a given Mirapoint server's backup cannot start because it isalready running. We use disk image backups on all eight Mirapointservers. Although our goal is to do selective backups so we canrecover individual mailboxes, that hasn't happened yet due to a flawon the Mirapoint NDMP client, so we do a full disk image backup eachnight.

I also have each Mirapoint server configured such that it is in itsown savegroup. The tape library they back up to is connected to ourNetWorker server. Four of the 13 Sony S-AIT in our tape library aredesignated as NDMP devices and these are what handle our Mirapointbackups. Each group is also assigned its own tape pool.

This strategy has been working fine for the past three years or so,since we first became a Mirapoint email shop. I am also certain thatthe data is recoverable because we have a test Mirapoint server thatallows us to recover data without inconveniencing users, so this getstesting about once every three months or so, and sometimes more often.

The problem is that some of our Mirapoint backups are taking morethan 24 hours to complete now, even for disk image backups, but whatis really strange is that in the NetWorker Administrator's GUI when Iclick on the "indexes" button, I see no evidence that backups havesucceeded, but if I use "mminfo -av -c" for our Mirapoint servers, itshows the details for backups since the upgrade. So mminfo and theNetWorker GUI are showing different results.

I have a call open with Mirapoint on this issue, but I am wonderingif anyone out there has also encountered this situation.

In the meanwhile, I am going to schedule a Mirapoint recover ASAP tosee what happens.


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