Have you tried forcing the NIC and switch to gig instead of auto-neg?

On Tuesday 30 January 2007 10:16, Stan Horwitz wrote:
> I am confronted with a problem backing up an Exchange 2003 server
> where the first (and largest) of four IS storage groups consistently
> fails and the next largest storage group fails intermittently. I have
> a call with EMC open and I have been looking at this issue for a week.
>
> We are pretty sure there is some sort of network issue at work here,
> but our network administrator is at a loss as to what it could be.
>
> This Exchange server consists of two Microsoft cluster nodes (Windows
> 2003) and this server has been in production since July. IS backups
> have been intermittently failing, but since about ten days ago, the
> largest storage group won't back up at all, except once when I tried
> it last week.
>
> There is nothing too illuminating in the event logs or on the logs
> in /nsr/applogs either, except for a consistently occurring network
> error. When the backup starts, it quickly gets to a very fast
> throughput and I have tried doing backups at a variety of different
> times. The largest storage group is probably pretty small compared to
> some Exchange shops. Its around 80GB and there are only around 200
> users on this server.
>
> I tried putting in an NSR_KEEPALIVE_WAIT environment variable with a
> value of 30 on both cluster nodes. I also tried putting in a
> keepalilvewait TCP/IP variable in the registry on both nodes. Neither
> made a difference.
>
> The event logs show backup failures, but nothing before or after the
> failed events is consistent. We do run Symanteck's Anti-virus
> software on this server, but we tried disabling and running a backup,
> but that backup also failed so we enabled the a-v software again.
>
> I am a Unix and Mac guy, so Windows 2003 is not my strong suit and
> the Exchange administrator here is inexperienced with it. We are
> learning by the seat of our pants about this server. This cluster and
> Exchange server was set up by Microsoft Professional Services and I
> set up the backups with assistance from EMC's tech support.
>
> The hardware consists of a pair of Dell blades and GB ethernet. The
> Dell ethernet card driver does not have any options to change how
> flow control is set, and EMC suggested we try using full flow control
> on it. This is the latest driver that Dell offers and I am not even
> sure that's our path to success.
>
> If anyone has any ideas on anything I might have overlooked on how I
> can solve this problem, please let me know.
>
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