Nigel Smith Posted October 8, 2020 Report Share Posted October 8, 2020 11 hours ago, DavidHertzberg said: MrPete, because of his evident prowess in Windows shown in this even-further-upthread post, should probably investigate the feasibility of writing such a script. There are two separate issues in this thread -- this "client running but bound to the wrong IP" (turn it off and on again, etc) vs x509's "client off and can't be started" (restart service). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidHertzberg Posted October 8, 2020 Report Share Posted October 8, 2020 14 hours ago, Nigel Smith said: There are two separate issues in this thread -- this "client running but bound to the wrong IP" (turn it off and on again, etc) vs x509's "client off and can't be started" (restart service). I understand that, but x509 has been suffering with -530 errors on his wife's Lenovo Yoga 730 machine for at least a year—and I'd like to automate the relief process for him as well. I'd like nothing better than for him to do a clean install using a retail copy of Windows, but he says "I probably should have done the same [clean install] with my wife's system when it was new, but too much time has passed now." Restart Service is no doubt overkill (a choice of word not originally intended to be humorous 🤣 ) for all the other administrators having a -530 problem with Windows "clients" that aren't "blessed" with Lenovo "bloatware", but it would be effective. Maybe there could be a single "command line" script that would first determine if the Client was On. If it wasn't, the script would do a Restart Service. Either way, the script would then do a "ping" of the "ipsave address"; if the "ping" didn't work, it would turn the Client off and on again. The problem is that, if the Client were Off, it couldn't run the "command line" script—so the "command line" script would have to be run at the end of the machine boot process. I'd like to avoid having the Retrospect Client Installer put in a machine-boot-process "command line" script for all other administrators; maybe the Installer could determine if the "client" machine is a Lenovo. Alternatively, we—or R.T.S.—would have to give x509 a separate script to install on his wife's machine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nigel Smith Posted October 9, 2020 Report Share Posted October 9, 2020 While I applaud your idea of "self-healing" Retrospect client, David, I can't help but feel it's like slapping a fresh bandage on a suppurating wound every morning -- far better to clean up the infection instead. Otherwise I fear that a relatively minor problem -- "I'm not getting backed up. Hmmm... Better fix that." -- could turn into a major one -- "I've had no alerts -- what do you mean my data hasn't been backed up for a month? My disk just failed!". Restarting a service manually may be a pain, though certainly less painful than a full reboot, but there are often unintended consequences -- and so, IMO, a choice the user should make. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidHertzberg Posted October 9, 2020 Report Share Posted October 9, 2020 Nigel Smith, Permit me to recount a personal story that will shed some light on Quote While I applaud your idea of "self-healing" Retrospect client, David, I can't help but feel it's like slapping a fresh bandage on a suppurating wound every morning -- far better to clean up the infection instead. I bought my first home computer in the Fall of 1988, preparatory to belatedly returning to college for 1.5 years to get a quickie BA in Computer Science. I bought a Mac because that's what my college recommended, and I followed that up with buying a Maynard QIC tape drive in February 1989. The backup software was not Retrospect but Maynstream—the ancestor of BE. My wife and I returned to NYC after I received my BA degree in the Spring of 1991; my wife had been using my original Mac for writing and drawing once I had bought a second Mac for myself in December 1989. In January 1992 I upgraded my Mac to System 7, following the Boston Computer Society Active Window recommendation to do so by wiping my backed-up HDD and installing System 7 from scratch. That worked fine, and my wife asked me to do the same for her Mac in February 1992. Maynstream couldn't read the Maynard backup I had made for her. I ended up shipping the backup tapes to Drive Savers, who managed to recover most of my wife's backed-up data for a charge of around $700 in 1992 U.S. currency. I bought a DAT tape drive in 1995, after a later disaster—whose details I can't remember—that resulted in my wife's permanently losing some of her Mac artwork, and have been running Retrospect with a Compare step every morning ever since—except 2010–2015 when I had no "backup server". (My now-ex-wife has continued to buy Macintoshes, and is using Time Machine for backup.) The applicable point of this story is that one has to be very careful about preserving the data—and applications—stored on a spouse's computer. It's possible that x509's wife has been using applications or Windows add-ons that came as part of the Lenovo "bloatware", which is why he would write "... but too much time has passed now." That's why I'd like to help him get a "self-healing" Retrospect Windows Client. A exact opposite of such carefulness is the attitude of the Ars Technica Other Hardware forum poster to whom I wrote the Private Message from which the story in the above lengthy paragraph is adapted (you didn't think I wrote it especially for this post, did you? 🤣 ). He is personally a Windows and Linux user, and wrote—of his wife and daughter's Macs—"computers that I don't want to support when a free alternative they can use to self-support exists. I'm not planning on throwing money away on a repeated basis buying upgrades to any potential software, I'm not planning on constantly making sure their backups are working, I'm not interested in walking them through periodic upgrades. If I can provide a service that they can use to self-support (the entire beauty of Time Machine) then I'm done. If Time Machine is unreliable, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it." I had cautiously suggested a client-server application (I'm not allowed to name Retrospect on the Ars forums except in one authorized Mac thread) for backing up to the NAS he wanted to buy, but ended up suggesting A**—a "push" backup application that would be enough for all his home computers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
x509 Posted October 11, 2020 Author Report Share Posted October 11, 2020 On 10/9/2020 at 2:40 PM, DavidHertzberg said: Nigel Smith, Permit me to recount a personal story that will shed some light on I bought my first home computer in the Fall of 1988, preparatory to belatedly returning to college for 1.5 years to get a quickie BA in Computer Science. I bought a Mac because that's what my college recommended, and I followed that up with buying a Maynard QIC tape drive in February 1989. The backup software was not Retrospect but Maynstream—the ancestor of BE. My wife and I returned to NYC after I received my BA degree in the Spring of 1991; my wife had been using my original Mac for writing and drawing once I had bought a second Mac for myself in December 1989. In January 1992 I upgraded my Mac to System 7, following the Boston Computer Society Active Window recommendation to do so by wiping my backed-up HDD and installing System 7 from scratch. That worked fine, and my wife asked me to do the same for her Mac in February 1992. Maynstream couldn't read the Maynard backup I had made for her. I ended up shipping the backup tapes to Drive Savers, who managed to recover most of my wife's backed-up data for a charge of around $700 in 1992 U.S. currency. I bought a DAT tape drive in 1995, after a later disaster—whose details I can't remember—that resulted in my wife's permanently losing some of her Mac artwork, and have been running Retrospect with a Compare step every morning ever since—except 2010–2015 when I had no "backup server". (My now-ex-wife has continued to buy Macintoshes, and is using Time Machine for backup.) The applicable point of this story is that one has to be very careful about preserving the data—and applications—stored on a spouse's computer. It's possible that x509's wife has been using applications or Windows add-ons that came as part of the Lenovo "bloatware", which is why he would write "... but too much time has passed now." That's why I'd like to help him get a "self-healing" Retrospect Windows Client. A exact opposite of such carefulness is the attitude of the Ars Technica Other Hardware forum poster to whom I wrote the Private Message from which the story in the above lengthy paragraph is adapted (you didn't think I wrote it especially for this post, did you? 🤣 ). He is personally a Windows and Linux user, and wrote—of his wife and daughter's Macs—"computers that I don't want to support when a free alternative they can use to self-support exists. I'm not planning on throwing money away on a repeated basis buying upgrades to any potential software, I'm not planning on constantly making sure their backups are working, I'm not interested in walking them through periodic upgrades. If I can provide a service that they can use to self-support (the entire beauty of Time Machine) then I'm done. If Time Machine is unreliable, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it." I had cautiously suggested a client-server application (I'm not allowed to name Retrospect on the Ars forums except in one authorized Mac thread) for backing up to the NAS he wanted to buy, but ended up suggesting A**—a "push" backup application that would be enough for all his home computers. David's story is interesting. Prior to using Retrospect, I also had a "fling" with Backup Exec. Prior to doing disk-to-disk backup, I went through QIC-tape and then DAT tape backup machines. But LTO tape drives cost more than a so-so used car, and the tapes are darn expensive, so I "embraced the inevitable" and went to disk-to-disk backup. I do use a separate backup drive for each year, for the cost of maybe 2-3 LTO tape cartridges. That Ars Technica poster is a damn fool. Maybe he will be OK, and maybe he won't. At the time we got that Lenovo laptop for my wife, I was extremely pressed for time. For about $60, I got a Laplink utility that essentially migrated all the programs and config settings from the old system to the new one. From experience, that's 2 full day process. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nigel Smith Posted October 11, 2020 Report Share Posted October 11, 2020 On 10/9/2020 at 10:40 PM, DavidHertzberg said: The applicable point of this story is that one has to be very careful about preserving the data—and applications—stored on a spouse's computer. Hell yea -- if it goes wrong at work I may get fired, if it goes wrong at home I'm in in real trouble! The point is that I'd rather it go wrong now, and I know about it, so I can fix it, rather than after a few months of a "self-healing" client trying (and failing) to continue on as normal... Of course, in an ideal world we'd have both! I'm just a bit hot on unintended consequences at the moment since we've just found out that a problem (concurrent-use software licences not being released if a client crashed rather than was quit) that we mitigated (scheduled daily scripted restart of the licensing daemon to free the zombie licences) has come back to bite us (external dept with 2 licences on our server advising their users to launch the software on 2 different machines every day and not quit, so they were running up to 15 concurrent instances rather than 2). While we could have justified a slight over-use if ever audited, such a deliberate breach of the Ts&Cs could have had repercussions -- and indeed it has, since the external dept is now firewalled out to only allow 2 client IPs and their users have to fight for time on those machines rather than use their own. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrPete Posted October 29, 2020 Report Share Posted October 29, 2020 You guys are SO funny! If I had time, I too would share a few stories but time is a bit short right now. I just want to clear up one bit of almost-confusion (didn't see this said in my skim to catch up...) NIGEL Smith -- you suggested just enabling backup/etc on 169.254.*.* -- No Can Do * That is what APIPA is all about * It CAN be used in very limited ways. One cool application: connect two laptops directly with a cable. NO assigned IP (so they both get a 169.254 random IP)... Groove Networks "Groove" would see that and sync the two computers! It was AMAZING at finding ways to sync * However, it's not a useful thing even in LAN context. (Worst case, don't block DHCP inquiries coming from an APIPA address... ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nigel Smith Posted October 30, 2020 Report Share Posted October 30, 2020 11 hours ago, MrPete said: NIGEL Smith -- you suggested just enabling backup/etc on 169.254.*.* -- No Can Do * That is what APIPA is all about * It CAN be used in very limited ways. One cool application: It was a suggestion aimed at "home users" having this problem, rather than yourself -- you (we!) need a better solution. The "cool application" for us Mac users is Migration Assistant. Old Mac, new Mac, ethernet cable between the two, fire up Migration Assistant on both, answer a few simple questions and walk away -- and when it's done, there's all your old "stuff" on your new machine, good to go. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
x509 Posted November 10, 2020 Author Report Share Posted November 10, 2020 On 10/7/2020 at 4:06 AM, Nigel Smith said: OK so, life in my hands (and knowing a workmate had just arrived at the office, so could press buttons if needed), I connected to the remote VM and logged into Windows. RS Client was running, and I could turn it off and on again. Ctrl-Alt-Del, Task Manager, found "retroclient.exe", "end process". Launched Retrospect Client, which showed Status as "Off", and the "Protected by..." checkbox greyed out. Spinning wheel every time I tried to interact with it. File C:\ProgramData\Retrospect Client\retroclient still present from before. After 5 minutes of "Program not responding", clicked the "Close program" option. Launched Client again, this time "Run as admin", same results. Ended process. Messed around with the retroclient file, still not launching. In Task Manager's "Services" tab, found "Retrospect Client", right-clicked, "Restart service". (Interestingly, that rotated the retroclient[.logn] files and created a new retroclient file.) Launched Client, everything A-OK! So I think that's your alternative to a reboot -- Task Manager->Services and "Restart" the "Retrospect Client". You don't even have to kill the Retrospect processes (Sys Tray, Inst Scan). Would love to hear how you get on next time your wife's machine has this problem... And my wife's Lenovo system has not had this problem again with disabled client, now that I have an easy fix. Go figure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrPete Posted October 31, 2023 Report Share Posted October 31, 2023 Long time, no visit. LOTS of life. I just skimmed the last few pages of this thread. A few small comments: 1) @DavidHertzberg your self-healing suggestion/ submission needs refinement. Consider a laptop that's roaming: your proposal will have the client continually restarting. 2) To me, the ultimate solution really should not be THAT hard for Retrospect Engineering: simply ensure the client refuses to ever connect to an APIPA address. If that's all it sees, wait N seconds and try again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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