sdube Posted January 23, 2004 Report Share Posted January 23, 2004 I configured several scripts on a schedule. For several days, that worked fine. Retrospect would automatically starts, proceed with the backup and then closes. But sometimes, retrospect didn't auto start so I start it myself and then the backups are starting. The backup was waiting for the application to start. I thought that the retrospect service would take care of that. The service is set to automatic and it is running at this time. So to correct the problem, I need to modify the preferences of retrospect: - Remove the check on the two items related to automatic application start - Exit retrospect - Start retrospect - Put the checks back Problem corrected. Is Dantz aware of this problem? Has anyone else experienced such a problem? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted January 26, 2004 Report Share Posted January 26, 2004 Hi The launcher service can become corrupt but it isn't very common. Usually following the steps in your post is enough to fix it for good. Please let us know if the problems come back. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sdube Posted January 27, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 27, 2004 From time to time it comes back alas... Haven't been able to pinpoint the cause though... Stécy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
viking001 Posted May 7, 2004 Report Share Posted May 7, 2004 This happens to me about once every couple of months. The only way I can make it start automatically again is to reboot. I tried unchecking the startup preferences and it did not work. Any other suggestions? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdonn Posted May 10, 2004 Report Share Posted May 10, 2004 This is a "me too" post. I'm currently using 6.0.206 Multi Server, and I've been using Retrospect for years now. This is the only remaining real problem we have, but it does happen once every month or two. I've never bothered to systematically try to figure out what makes it start working again. Sometimes we reboot; sometimes we do a manual backup; sometimes we switch backup sets early. I've never tried the checking and unchecking. I'll try that today and post tomorrow whether it made things start back up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
viking001 Posted May 10, 2004 Report Share Posted May 10, 2004 The checking and unchecking by itself, does not work. I tried it 3 or 4 times. I found the following suggetstion elsewhere in this forum. Have not tried it yet. Also requires a reboot. http://forums.dantz.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=multiserver&Number=34176&Forum=f25&Words=launcher&Searchpage=0&Limit=25&Main=34159&Search=true&where=bodysub&Name=&daterange=1&newerval=1&newertype=y&olderval=&oldertype=&bodyprev=#Post34176 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdonn Posted May 11, 2004 Report Share Posted May 11, 2004 Well, I guess I can't say that checking and unchecking *caused* it to begin working again, but it *did* begin working again. I did check and uncheck the flags yesterday which I noted stopped and disabled and then enabled and started the launcher service. The machine was not rebooted and I didn't reinstall anything, and we did get backups this morning. They had not run previously for 3-4 days. I'm sure it will happen again. As another poster noted, it recurs every month or two, which really takes a bite out of your backup reliability. I'll try to post back to this thread with any other observations in the future. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted May 13, 2004 Report Share Posted May 13, 2004 Make sure the server is being rebooted regularly - at least every few weeks - to see if the problem clears up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
viking001 Posted May 13, 2004 Report Share Posted May 13, 2004 I don't think I should have to reboot the server that often. I have other versions of Retrospect for Windows and Macintosh elsewhere on the network and Retrospect will continue to launch automatically for a very very long time without a reboot on those computers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdonn Posted May 17, 2004 Report Share Posted May 17, 2004 I said I'd post back to this thread with any other observations. So here we are a week later and it stopped again. I did the last round of "unchecking and checking" last Monday. Backups also occurred Tuesday and Wednesday evening, but apparently didn't start up Thursday evening. I've got my client configured to notify me if I go two days without a backup. Since the last backup was Wednesday evening, the client didn't notify anyone until Friday evening, when, of course, everyone was home. So we didn't get backups Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Today, Monday, we got the notification that we hadn't been backed up, and here I am. And for the record, this server definitely gets booted at least every few weeks. That's not the problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdonn Posted May 18, 2004 Report Share Posted May 18, 2004 More followup. The unchecking and rechecking again seemed to cause backups to begin working again. We got full backups last night. For the record, the first time I unchecked, I only did the one that says "Enabled Retrospect Launcher Service" which caused the other one to become grayed, but still checked. This time I unchecked both of them which actually causes the service to be uninstalled and reinstalled in the services list. We'll see how long it works this time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted May 24, 2004 Report Share Posted May 24, 2004 I'm running RetroPro and RetroMS on assorted W2K (Pro & Server) and XP Pro boxes. On many the Launcher service works reliably to start Retro on schedule. But not on all... On one machine I just leave RMS running all the time (pretty much have to since its running Proactive). I've heard of others doing this with RP, esp. in cases where the machine is secure or locked. The most interesting machine is an XP Pro box running RP (6.5.0, RDU 5.0.x). After a reboot the Launcher service would/will work OK for a few days and then "fade" to no longer launching RP. But the little red square launcher icon hangs out in the task bar with the Launcher starting but mysteriously unable to launch the app itself. I finally enabled another program (Unisyn Automate, already installed on the machine for something else) that monitors RP ("is Retrospect.exe running?") and will launch it two minutes after the scheduled start time if RP hasn't launched. And then it quits the program a few hours after it should have completed the script and quit *if* it doesn't auto-quit. It's kind of funny to look at the logs and see RP launch itself on schedule one day (2:15AM), then fail to launch the next day (2:17AM) then successfully launch itself the next day (2:15AM), etc. all without my intervention. The works/doesn't work/works/works.../doesn't work/works... pattern kind of puts the crimp in the "launcher service has become corrupted" theory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted May 26, 2004 Report Share Posted May 26, 2004 GoAWest, Have you tried unchecking the "Show Icon in taskbar" under the check at quit section of the preferences? If you do this does Retrospect fail to launch completely? I know we talked about this before but I don't recall turning off this setting. Thanks Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted May 26, 2004 Report Share Posted May 26, 2004 I tried unchecking the "Show Icon in taskbar" prefs option. 1) It made no difference to the Launcher's abilty to launch RP on schedule. It still failed to start RP at the scheduled launch time (2:15AM) but my backup backup launcher (Automate) launched RP at 2:17AM and shut it down on at 9AM, so my backups got run. 2) It *did* get rid of the blinking red cube in the taskbar. So while it's not working any better, it doesn't annoy the user with any error or warning message or display. Of course if it wasn't for my Automate setup backups wouldn't be running at all and there wouldn't be a red cube icon in the taskbar to warn the user that something is wrong... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted June 1, 2004 Report Share Posted June 1, 2004 Hi I'm just curious... I wonder if scheduling a batch file to periodically restart the launcher service would also work around this problem? If so we could at least narrow the cause of the problem down to the launcher service stopping/ becoming invalid. Thanks Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted June 2, 2004 Report Share Posted June 2, 2004 I've set an Automate script (rather than a batch file because it's handy) to restart (stop and start) the RP Launcher service daily. I'll report what happens. Looking at the log for the last several days (e.g. since 5/24), based on the start time (2:17AM) it looks like the unattended RP Launcher failed to launch every day *except* for one, on 5/31 when it launched on schedule (2:15AM). And then it failed again on 6/1. As noted, my AM script bailed me out. -------------------------------- BTW, after running unattended and error free for the last week, last night RP 6.5.350/RDU 5.0.105 again reported "Can't use Open File Backup for ABC on Drive_V (V:), error -1017 (insufficient permissions)" on two separate backup scripts on this XP SP1 PC. This of course is pure bunk as the permissions were and are fine and nothing has changed on the machine (where V = local NTFS IDE drive, 30G free) or network. The "cure" as reported in my last post has been reboot the machine although I have not yet done so on this PC. I would greatly prefer a *fix.* Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted June 2, 2004 Report Share Posted June 2, 2004 No-go on restarting the RP Launcher service. My script stopped then started this service at 6PM yesterday, but RP/RP Launcher failed to launch at 2:15AM this morning (Automate started RP for me at 2:17AM so my backups ran). I'm also now getting a continuous (i.e. on every script) run of [bogus] "Can't use Open File Backup for ABC on Drive_V (V:), error -1017 (insufficient permissions)" so perhaps there's a linkage between this and RP/RP Launcher's failure to autostart the program. I haven't yet rebooted the PC to "cure" this issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted June 4, 2004 Report Share Posted June 4, 2004 Hi Well I am stumped once again... You bring up an interesting point: The launcher services and the volume shadow copy service (used for open file backups on XP) are both services. Its as if both of them are failing after a certain period of time and coming back to life after a reboot. Now if I only knew what could cause services to fail over time... Are there any other services that jump to mind that could interfere? Could flaky RAM do something like this? Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nigep Posted June 4, 2004 Report Share Posted June 4, 2004 I am getting the same problems as you are with the launcher. I do the unticking restarting and ticking scenario and it works but only for a while. Surely this is an issue that Dantz need to address. My servers are critical and it is difficult to schedule in restarts just because a service becomes corrupted Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted June 6, 2004 Report Share Posted June 6, 2004 I haven't had a chance to do a memory test (Memtest86, http://www.memtest86.com/ recommended) since this is a server PC that I can't take-off line during peak hours for a long memory test. However, I think a memory problem is unlikely. I did, however, figure out why I was getting the "Can't use Open File Backup for ABC on Drive_V (V:), error -1017 (insufficient permissions)" error. After you mentioned the "launcher services and the volume shadow copy service" I went in to see the state of both services, intending to restart both of them with my daily script. However, I found that the "Volume Shadow Copy" service was set to Manual (rather than Automatic or another mode). I set it to Automatic and RP was able to run that night without any OFB errors. A few things of note: 1) I have no idea how it got set to Manual. I certainly didn't change it and nobody else has access to this PC (nor would change it or know what VSC was). So it seems likely that another task, RP, the OS, ?? changed the mode. I checked another XP machine where I'm running RP and found that the VSC mode was "Automatic" with a status of "Stopped" (apparently allowing RP to Start it as needed). 2) The message could be improved. Although *literally* true ("Can't use Open File Backup"), a better diagnostic message would inform the user that the VSC service wasn't running or couldn't be started. And perhaps RP could start/try to start the service and report the outcome in the log. Also the "error -1017 (insufficient permissions)" part of the message makes it sound like there's a problem with the RP login when that's not true. 3) Although changing this fixed the OFB errors, it didn't correct the problem of the Retrospect Launcher service being unable to start RP on schedule. I'm still running in CYA-mode, with my Automate backup launcher starting and quitting Retrospect if it doesn't do so on its own. As before, I have not rebooted the machine thru any of this (OFB failure or Launcher failure) but may do so shortly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
queball Posted June 16, 2004 Report Share Posted June 16, 2004 I have been getting launcher failures since we first started using Retrospect. (The first release of 6.5) Sometimes it will run for a month without a problem and sometimes I need to go in and uncheck those preferences and turn them back on a few times a week. We have rebuilt the server once. Doing a total format of the hard drive and completely reloading all the software but it was the same before and after. (The reload was for other reasons anyhow) I basically have turned on all the email reports including using the eventhandler sample script to email success messages. I know that if I don't have a bunch of email messages in the morning that it failed and I just go disable and enable the preferences for starting automatically. Our setup is not exotic. We do disk backup only, no tape. Backup sources are 4 windows clients and 1 macos 9 client. All these clients are connected over VPN links so I have frequent cases where the backup is interrupted due to a network failure. This is actually normal since the backups are done overnight through the same hours that the ISP's use for network maintenance. If I could do backup during the day then I would get far fewer failures. I actually have my script retry the same backup 3 times a night so that if it gets interrupted it will usually finish off during the next attempt. Overall the only real problem I have with the product anymore is the inconsistent ability to start automatically. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdonn Posted June 17, 2004 Report Share Posted June 17, 2004 I'm just reporting my latest failure. My backups ran on 6/14 and then failed to launch. My previous launch failure occurred almost exactly a month ago with my last backup on 5/12. After reading about GoAWest's success using the Automate utility, I decided to try the bonehead approach of just using Window's Scheduled Tasks to start Retrospect. I'm not sure what will happen if the launcher has already started it because I don't have any good way to ask whether it's already running. I'll report back whether this works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kdonn Posted August 25, 2004 Report Share Posted August 25, 2004 I've been using the approach of just starting Retrospect with Windows' Scheduled Tasks and two months later I've had no cases of the backups failing to run. I just added a task that starts Retrospect every day at 9:03, which is three minutes after Retrospect is supposed to start itself. If Retrospect isn't already started, it starts up and begins its Proactive Backup. If Retrospect is already started, and this is the first time that the Scheduled Task runs, a dialog comes up saying that Retrospect is already running. After that when the Scheduled Task runs, no further dialogs are displayed, so they don't just build up if you don't check on things for days or weeks. So, at least for me, this solves the only ongoing problem I've had with Retrospect reliability. I hope it's useful for someone else as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mieslep Posted August 29, 2004 Report Share Posted August 29, 2004 Thanks kdonn, I'll give that a shot. I'm using XP (Home) and have had the same problem for a very long time. My $0.02 worth: Dantz needs to fix this problem! The above solution works okay if you've a server (as knowledgable people are the only people with access). It is really crap if you use Fast User Switching in XP and have non-technical people (such as kids) using the system. My expectation is that Retrospect will simply run in the background, without popping up any dialog boxes or status bars or anything of the sort. Let me (the administrator) look in on the thing from time to time... Please, Dantz, put a fix to this in the next patch!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted August 31, 2004 Report Share Posted August 31, 2004 Hi FWIW -I've been following this issue for a while. At this point I'm not sure its a Retrospect problem. Services just seem to fail from time to time on XP. My hunch is that it is a memory management problem in the OS.... Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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