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Several Issues with mac Clients


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Hi everyone, from the start we had many different client problems, from double volume listing, to several "mac specific" filters and options that wouldn't work, On Demand Restore won't work, basically all conf lost due to upgrading from 15x to 16x while using certificates to authenticate clients and so.... most of them i managed to fix by myself... 
Now, after Catalina OS, no client will work, i've done every step in the upgrading guide, verified security configs, even tried to uninstall the client (using the uninstall script) and re installed it with no effect.

 Persistent issues;

1- In screenshot 1 you will see a client that appears reachable, shows no errors and has every backup mark as successful. After looking closer, those backups are empty, 0kb.
If i try to examine this client volume, it will show me an empty list as shown in screenshot 2, and if i try to set up a sub-volume in there, it will give me a permissions error, as seen on screenshot 3

2- Another Client is on a loop trying to be updated. It just "Successfully Executes" updates from 16.1 to 16.5 again and again (message shown in Screenshot 4)

3- The Dashboard just stopped loading, no error, nothing. Tried starting as administrator and running it from console, no error. Task manager does not show any zombi/dormant/frizzed processes

4- We had  a few clients that were just unreachable after the upgrade and we had to uninstall and re install only to find them in situation Nº 1

I'm also attaching the execution log of a client, note that the selector 'selects' 0 files... obviously the selector was checked and worked until the Catalina upgrade, i'm sure it has something to do with the client not being able to read the disk... even after selecting them for such permissions on System Settings


Our setup is the following
We have a Win server running Retrospect 16.5 and around 40 mac clients, all of them laptops with only one network interface. Server and Clients are on the same subnet, all clients running 16.5. 
All clients with Catalina show problems  

Sorry for the screenshots in spanish!  

screenshot1.png

screenshot2.png

screenshot3.png

screenshot4.png

log.png

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On 12/6/2019 at 2:30 PM, Pesetus said:

Hi everyone, from the start we had many different client problems, from double volume listing, to several "mac specific" filters and options that wouldn't work, On Demand Restore won't work, basically all conf lost due to upgrading from 15x to 16x while using certificates to authenticate clients and so.... most of them i managed to fix by myself... 
Now, after Catalina OS, no client will work, i've done every step in the upgrading guide, verified security configs, even tried to uninstall the client (using the uninstall script) and re installed it with no effect.

 ....


Our setup is the following
We have a Win server running Retrospect 16.5 and around 40 mac clients, all of them laptops with only one network interface. Server and Clients are on the same subnet, all clients running 16.5. 
All clients with Catalina show problems  
 

....

screenshot3.png

 

Pesetus,

You need to read this Knowledge Base article, and also this one.  Note that the first KB article, in its last multi-sentence paragraph, erroneously links to the Mojave version of the second KB article rather than the Catalina version—which it should have (except that somebody on Retrospect "Inc."'s. august Documentation Committee didn't coordinate what he wrote in the first article with somebody else who was rewriting the second article for Catalina).

Also, on general principles, I suggest you upgrade your Retrospect Windows "backup server" to version 16.6.0.133—which was just released 4 days ago.

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  • 1 month later...
On 12/6/2019 at 5:04 PM, DavidHertzberg said:

Pesetus,

You need to read this Knowledge Base article, and also this one.  Note that the first KB article, in its last multi-sentence paragraph, erroneously links to the Mojave version of the second KB article rather than the Catalina version—which it should have (except that somebody on Retrospect "Inc."'s. august Documentation Committee didn't coordinate what he wrote in the first article with somebody else who was rewriting the second article for Catalina).

Also, on general principles, I suggest you upgrade your Retrospect Windows "backup server" to version 16.6.0.133—which was just released 4 days ago.

Hi there, thanks for the quick response and sorry for my delay!! its been an eventful month but am back!

As for your comment.... I did checked those articles and did as it suggests. The sever has been updated and all clients checked again for those configs, i attached a screenshot of that so you can see it... also, there is no error in logs showing that kind of problems (as mentioned the KB "Retrospect has detected it is not listed under "Full Disk Access" on the backup source system and cannot access all user data to create a complete backup. Please follow our step-by-step guide: https://www.retrospect.com/kb/macos_full_disk_access.")

As for the previous problems they all continue the same.

Captura de Pantalla 2020-01-13 a la(s) 14.17.19.png

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/14/2020 at 9:18 AM, Pesetus said:

Done!, thanks, i do have paid support i just hoped for more experienced users to have a tip i did not know about.

Thanks again. With some luck, i will have a response here or at support and i will post the results .

 

For those who were wondering what post Pesetus was responding to, it was one of mine that it turns out Big Brother has deleted.

The horrifying content 🙄 of that post which B.B., otherwise known as the head of Retrospect Tech Support, evidently objected to was my merely having repeated what another administrator said about European Retrospect Tech Support in the first paragraph of this post in another thread nearly two years ago.  IIRC I advised Pesetus to contact U.S. Tech Support, which evidently he/she has done.

So Big Brother is indeed watching you on these Forums, or at least is watching me.  I could suggest better uses of his time.

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On 1/28/2020 at 7:36 AM, Pesetus said:

for example answering my ticket... last update 4 days ago and still waiting.... (ticket opened 14 days ago)....  Thank you very much for your comments David.

Pesetus,

To be fair to Retrospect Technical Support:  Once an administrator customer's problem has been determined to be a bug, R.T.S. has to turn it over to the Retrospect "engineer" programmers to be fixed.  Getting to that determination can take time, because R.T.S. has to first reproduce the problem—which may require asking the customer further questions beyond what is in the Support Case.  R.T.S. must then decide if use of existing Retrospect features can solve the problem; if not, the problem is either a bug or a feature enhancement request.

Right now the engineers seem to be very busy changing the Graphic User Interface of Retrospect, IMHO so that it will be suitable for running the "backup server" Engine on a Drobo NAS device as well as either a Windows or Macintosh computer.  This is a task imposed on them by StorCentric—the new owners of Retrospect "Inc.".  Remembering and  "reading the tea leaves", in the 1.5 years before the June 2019 merger the engineers were busy adding a couple of major new features to Retrospect—IMHO ones conceived by Retrospect Product Management in order to attract the attention of IT consultants and large-scale enterprises.  in their rush to to do that, the engineers seem to have been a bit careless in adding some less-exalted features to x.5 and x.6.0 releases—especially when it came to testing.  On top of that, the engineers had to cope with Operating System "improvements"—both by Apple and by Microsoft.

And that's why I'm still running Retrospect Mac 16.1, with my major "client" machine and my "backup server" machine under macOS releases two and three generations behind Catalina.  Because I'm the not-very-ambitious sole user of a home installation, I can do that—but you evidently can't.

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Yesterday afternoon  they gave me instructions on how to proceed.
i still need to follow it up to be sure but it seems the backups are back to normal. The solution was an update to 16.6.0.307 (file given by the support team), probably the next available update...

i can understand they being with loads of work to do, i did have a payed backup solution that did not work for more than a month, even after the release of the "catalina supported" version (obviously without much testing), and 14 days after they recognize the bug in my case and said "We have a fix and we should be able to provide it to you in the next day or two"....

 

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11 hours ago, Pesetus said:

Yesterday afternoon  they gave me instructions on how to proceed.
i still need to follow it up to be sure but it seems the backups are back to normal. The solution was an update to 16.6.0.307 (file given by the support team), probably the next available update...

i can understand they being with loads of work to do, i did have a payed backup solution that did not work for more than a month, even after the release of the "catalina supported" version (obviously without much testing), and 14 days after they recognize the bug in my case and said "We have a fix and we should be able to provide it to you in the next day or two"....

 

Pesetus,

Thank you for reporting back to us on the Forums.

I'm assuming the 16.6.0.307 update given to you by R.T.S. is for the Retrospect Windows "backup server", rather than for the Retrospect Client program on your Mac Catalina "client" machines.  That sounds to me as if the engineers had not sufficiently tested the Retrospect Windows 16.6.0.133 "backup server" software with Retrospect Mac 16.5.1.104 Client software on machines running running under Catalina.  Running that combination of Retrospect software is a bit unusual—but many mostly-Windows installations also have Macs; obviously the engineers should have tested.

The question for the rest of us administrators is whether the engineers will release the 16.6.0.307 update as a new distribution for Retrospect 16, or whether it is merely a test version of the Retrospect Windows 17.0 distribution—which according to past practices ought to come in the second week of March 2020.

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Pesetus,

Please, as soon as you know whether the 16.6.0.307 update given to you by R.T.S. works or not, notify Retrospect Tech Support.  That will be important for other administrators, so the engineers can decide (assuming the update works) whether to release it for Retrospect 16 and/or Retrospect 17.

I'm sorry I didn't think to tell you this yesterday.  The deadline for a Retrospect 16 bug-fix release is probably 28 February.  Please do your follow-up quickly.

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  • 1 month later...

My suspicion in the second paragraph of this up-thread post turns out to have been misplaced.  Per Retrospect Windows 17.0.0 cumulative Release Notes: "Mac Client: Fixed issue where non-English Windows ["backup server"] engine showed main Catalina volume as empty (#8415)".   The bug resulted from a different limitation—failure to test non-English variants of "backup server" and Client software— than the one I suspected for Retrospect "Inc." beta testing.

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