Liptrot Posted January 12, 2004 Report Share Posted January 12, 2004 Configuration: - Client and Server are Windows XP - Network: Local Wireless 802.11g - Retrospect: Professional 6.5 Just upgraded from Retrospect 6.0 to 6.5. If my client (Compaq M700 Laptop) has been woken up from stand-by the retrospect client is not seen by the server when time comes for a backup (client not found). If I go to the control panel on the client and access the client app, it is completley grayed out. If I reboot the client, everything works fine. Any ideas? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted January 13, 2004 Report Share Posted January 13, 2004 Hi This has come up on the forum before. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a good workaround other than to restart the client service. Dantz is looking into this. Thanks Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
7tronics Posted January 18, 2004 Report Share Posted January 18, 2004 In thread, first post said that the client was greyed out, fixed by reboot of PC. Second post says "restart client". On Win2K and XP, how can one "restart client" ? Is it possible to do same on WinMe ? Cheers & 73 de Mark @ 7tronics Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted January 19, 2004 Report Share Posted January 19, 2004 Hi Unfortunately, for WinME you would have to reboot. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jfalek Posted January 27, 2004 Report Share Posted January 27, 2004 This doesn't seem to be acceptable for us. We have several Windows XP client laptops and it is very problematic for us to tell these users that after they travel with their laptops, that they need to reboot their machines or that they need to restart the Retrospect service in order to facilitate backups. Our goal is to make the backups transparent - to tell them that they either can't use the sleep feature with their PC's or that they have to reboot is ludicrous. Why do their other PC services continue to work following sleep? Is is possible to get the service to spawn a new thread which restarts the the service in the background? Can anyone help? Thank you, James Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted January 28, 2004 Report Share Posted January 28, 2004 We are aware of this issue and are currently investigating it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liptrot Posted January 30, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 30, 2004 A previous poster said that this had been known for a while....can you make sure this issue has some priority. Also, this problem only started for me when I upgraded to 6.5. The previous version of retrospect did not have this issue. I am going to try to install the old client to see if I can make it go away for now until you can fix it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted January 31, 2004 Report Share Posted January 31, 2004 Add me to the list of folks impacted the Client standby bug. This morning I found a machine that wasn't responding and a check showed that the Retro Client was "greyed out" (off and couldn't change anything) and reporting that the client network wasn't available. I ended up doing a deinstall/reinstall which "fixed" things at that moment but then I found this post regarding the standby issue. For the moment, I'm probably going to disable standby on all PCs and only use the monitor power down for power savings. I can get away with that in this environment since the PCs are generally turned on in the morning and off in the afternoon. But it will become a problem on PCs where that isn't true, on laptops, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted January 31, 2004 Report Share Posted January 31, 2004 Actually changing the System standby setting (and monitor & hard disk turn off as Power Options) is an "easier said than done." MS, in its infinite wisdom, elected to make this an Administrative functions. So while a user logged in with User permissions (common for Domain PCs, and MS keeps yelling at us to *not* stay logged in as Admins) can change the screen saver timeout from the default 5min, they *can't* change the default 20min "Turn off monitor" timeout, change the Standby timeout, etc. So, in regards to changing Standby to "Never", a User-level account can't do this. And although an Administrator can log in (either logging in directly or doing a shift_Run-As... on the Power Options or Display snap-in/control panel), this *only* changes these settings for the "Administrator" account, not for other accounts. The only way I've found to change the Standby (and other power option) settings for a User is to temporarily promote them to Administrators, log in as them (assumes that you have the actual user's password at that moment), make the changes, then change them back to a User-level account. And this has to be done one-by-one for each User logging into the PC, new users added to the PC, etc. Does anybody know of quicker and easier way (a Run-As..., a registry setting, etc.) to change the power options for a User-level accounts so that Standby can be disabled? And ideally a way to change the default settings for *all* accounts, for "no user logged in" or "new user" situations, etc.? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
themicah Posted February 3, 2004 Report Share Posted February 3, 2004 I too am suffering greatly from this bug. It has made our new investment in our small network of a dedicated XP box and $250 worth of RS software almost completely useless, because our laptop users' RS clients die whenever they put their machines in standby (which is several times a day). The odds are virtually nil that a laptop will have been awake-since-restart when the scheduled backups run, so RS keeps logging "client not found" errors. A fix for this bug should be SUPER HIGH priority! Please let us know as soon as it's available! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
themicah Posted February 3, 2004 Report Share Posted February 3, 2004 Quote: natew said: This has come up on the forum before. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a good workaround other than to restart the client service. Dantz is looking into this. How exactly do I restart the client service without rebooting? Is there a way to automate this with Windows scheduled tasks or something? The machines in question are Win2k (problem confirmed) and WinXP Pro (problem suspected). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted February 3, 2004 Report Share Posted February 3, 2004 Hi The Retrospect client service is a standard windows service. You can start it from the services control panel. I think a simple batch file could be used however accidentaly restarting the client service midway through a backup will probably stop the backup. Unfortunately Idon't have any updated info about a resolution for this issue. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
themicah Posted February 3, 2004 Report Share Posted February 3, 2004 Ah, now I see it. Couldn't find the services CP at first (I've been a Mac guy since Win98, not too used to this whole Win2k/XP experience). Restarting the service does indeed take care of it (at least until the next time it goes into stanby), but my users are not going to want to manually restart the service every time they wake up their computers. I guess we'll just have to wait for a patch, unless somebody comes up with a batch file that will somehow automatically restart the service on wake-from-standby. That's all I really need. Thanks, natew! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted February 3, 2004 Report Share Posted February 3, 2004 I belive the problem may not exist in the 6.0 client. It would be worth a try, for the time being, to install the 6.0 client on a machine or two to see if the problem is resolved until we have a fix available. www.dantz.com/updates Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tlemons Posted February 4, 2004 Report Share Posted February 4, 2004 I think: NET STOP RETROSPECT NET START RETROSPECT should stop and restart the client. These commands can be put into a script. Running this just before backups begin on the client systems should work fine, as they won't interrupt backups. Any thoughts about how to get Retrospect to run this on the client before backups begin? I looked for, but didn't find, the idea of a pre-processing step in the Retrospect manual. Thanks tl Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
7tronics Posted February 4, 2004 Report Share Posted February 4, 2004 Before I experiement with this, can someone verify that the 6.0 client install and work with 6.5 Pro ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
7tronics Posted February 4, 2004 Report Share Posted February 4, 2004 Nice idea, but I have been unable to start/stop Retroclient using NET START, NET STOP on Win2K pro. Is there another way ? And does that method require Admin permissions on Win2K/XP ? As in the other thread within this area on the client problems, one key issue here is requirement for admin permission which managed PC environments don't assign to users. Don't want to rely more upon Retrospect snapshots recovering PCs than I have to ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
7tronics Posted February 4, 2004 Report Share Posted February 4, 2004 Mainly concerned over whether or not there are license issues with 6.0 client running on Retro 6.5 Pro. Can I simply use the "updater" for 6.0 client as I don't currently have access to 6.0 client ? If this DOES work, then perhaps an excellent work-around is to make the 6.0 client available with instructions and limitations noted, to the 6.5 licencees. Not all of us went the 6.0 to 6.5 route with all of our systems (or customers). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted February 5, 2004 Report Share Posted February 5, 2004 The 6.0 client is compatible with the 6.5 application. www.dantz.com/updates Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
noca Posted February 11, 2004 Report Share Posted February 11, 2004 I'm having the same sort of trouble with our one Dell Inspiron laptop running Win2KPro and connected over 802.11b. Coming out of standby, the client is all greyed out and doesn't work. I resolved it by disabling standby, but I would have prefered not to. At least I can maintain separate power settings for "plugged-in" and "on battery." The laptop only ever gets backed up when it's also "plugged-in", so it's still scheduled to go into standby when running off its batteries. As an aside, I found standby troubling for Retrospect anyway. Our backup (hosted by a desktop running Win2KPro) takes a few hours, and the script I created puts the laptop last to backup. Often, by the time it was the laptop's turn to backup, it would have already gone into standby mode, causing the backup to fail for that one (laptop) computer. Is there a way to get the laptop to wake up from standby when it's time for its backup? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arnstein Posted February 12, 2004 Report Share Posted February 12, 2004 Quote: Noca said: As an aside, I found standby troubling for Retrospect anyway. Our backup (hosted by a desktop running Win2KPro) takes a few hours, and the script I created puts the laptop last to backup. Often, by the time it was the laptop's turn to backup, it would have already gone into standby mode, causing the backup to fail for that one (laptop) computer. Is there a way to get the laptop to wake up from standby when it's time for its backup? I have found that "standby" is, like so much of Microsoft's output, a feature that works some of the time, and often not well. Nevertheless, if you wish to experiment, you can try to wake the laptop using another half-working technology called "Wake-On-LAN." Your laptop's Ethernet interface must support this feature in hardware. Anyway, if your laptop is capable, you can get a free Wake-On-LAN script from http://gsd.di.uminho.pt/jpo/software/wakeonlan/. This is a perl package, so you would have to install perl on some machine on your network (not the laptop!) Have fun. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmchale Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 Given this problem has been around for over half a year and a major upgrade, with dantz not caring, I guess I made a mistake going to retrospect.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted March 5, 2004 Report Share Posted March 5, 2004 We do care and we are working on fixing those bugs right now. I am not sure when an update will be out to address this issue though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wkegel Posted March 10, 2004 Report Share Posted March 10, 2004 I have seen similar problems but with a few twists. I run a Retrospect server on a Mac OS-X 10.3.2 system. The problems started when I upgraded the server to version 6, and used the Client updater included on the CD to upgrade all Windows clients to version 6.5.132. One of these clients is a Dell laptop running Win2K, which has 3 volumes on it which need to be backed up. The behaviour of this client can only be described as erratic. Sometimes it would not be visible at all; at other times it would be visible and properly backup the first volume and then "drop out of sight" before it got to the second or third volume. Also, in the client database the client would be shown as "responding"; if I then try to configure the client it would tell me that the client is not visible on the network. I found in another thread the suggestion that the problem might be related to the fact that there are multiple IP stacks (which that laptop has; it also has a dial-up connection and a VPN connection to my company network) at that it solved by binding the client to a fixed IP address. I tried that but it didn't work. I finally de-installed the client and re-installed the 6.0 client and that seems to work fine. I'm not convinced that it has anything to do with standby mode however. I have seen similar problems on an XP desktop, if the user on that system defers the backup a few times. By the time the client is ready for the retry it also is not visible any more. If I look closely at the polling window however, I notice that it takes about 2 minutes before the server decides that the client is not visible; if the system is really shut down that time is only a few seconds. This XP box does not have multiple IP stacks. There several people using this system however, so user switching occurs quite frequently; may that has something to do with it? Again, going back to the 6.0 client solved the problem. I hope these details may help solve this bug. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
themicah Posted April 23, 2004 Report Share Posted April 23, 2004 In my initial tests with Client 6.5.136 (http://www.dantz.com/en/support/updates.dtml), it looks like this issue may finally have been solved. I'll report back after I've tested it more thoroughly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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