I recently added a Windows client to a stable Solaris NetBackup
installation. During the window for nightly incrementals, it's
performing the incrementals over and over, unlike all the other
clients, and I'm wondering how to get it not to do that.

Master: 6.0MP4 / Solaris 10 / SL500 with LTO3 drives
Most clients are 6.0MP4 / Solaris 9 or 10.
Problem client: 6.0MP4 / Windows XP
Problem client is also listed as a "SERVER" in everyone's bp.conf
so it can run the admin console.

At first, a full backup was unable to complete in reasonable time,
while the client ground to a halt, so I had to disable open-file
backups / VSP.

Backup selection on the policy is ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES, but the
exclude list contains "*" and a couple of directories are in the
include list (C:\Documents and Settings and D:\something). The
idea being that other clients added to the policy in future could
have different areas they need backed up. No files are ever
backed up from System_State:\ because of the exclude list, but
including part of it didn't change the behavior either.

The schedule is frequency-based, every "1 days", with
1 month retention. Another schedule in the same policy does
weekly full backups. Have tried all combinations of Differential
& Cumulative, date-based & archive-bit-based, all producing
repetitive incrementals about every 14 minutes during the nightly
start windows. Incrementals usually finish in about 4 minutes,
so I can only assume the master's 10-minute job retry delay is
being added onto that. The master also has "Schedule backup
attempts" set to 2 tries per 12 hours. Have restarted NBU on the
master, no change.

Usually the job status on the parent job and all three streams
(C:\, D:\, and System_State:\) is status 0. Occasionally C:\
produces status 1 due to a Firefox lock file, etc.
There is also usually a warning on the C:\ backup, even when it
returns status 0:

   11/20/07 00:02:29 - Warning bpbrm(pid=21835) from client  
PROBLEM_CLIENT: WRN - Removable Storage Management: unable to export  
database (WIN32 21: The device is not ready. )

Could this warning be related to the repeated incrementals? I
think we can try disabling Removable Storage but don't know if
that will break anything else. The client has no direct access
to tape drives but may have a zip drive and legacy backups that
need to work, independent of NBU.

Other ideas appreciated.

Robert Griffin
Unix Systems Administrator
OIT, Enterprise Technology
The University of Alabama
<rmg AT ua DOT edu> | 205-348-0177


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