urza311 Posted August 2, 2005 Report Share Posted August 2, 2005 I've got a single Mac setup to do over-the-network backups of 15 Windows clients. That Mac is running OS X 10.3.9 with Retrospect Workgroup 6.0.204 (driver update 6.4.102), and the client are all 7.0.107. This setup has been working fine for months. This weekend, I upgrade all our Windows stations from Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition 9 to 10, and also added Spy Sweeper Enterprise Edition. Everything's groovy -- except for 3 of the 15 clients. When the nightly backup ran yesterday, it reported this error: > Can't access volume sramirez on SR, error -53 (volume off-line). I've tried rebooting the Mac station, rebooting the Windows station, deleting the client from the Retrospect list and adding it back, but it still won't find any volumes on these clients. The "configure" tab on these clients works fine; I can sync time, change the client name -- no problem. The firewall exceptions on the clients are also find (this setup had worked previously, as I mentioned). But if I go to the "volumes" tab on these three clients, I see "network communication failed" -- that's it, no more details. There are no error messages in the System Event logs on these clients, and the retroclient.exe process is running just fine on them. There's nothing special about these three non-working clients, either. In fact, they're pretty unremarkable -- many of the other clients that are working fine have a lot more software installed, more peripherals, etc. -- so nothing about them stands out at all. I've seen this "network communication failed" error before, and usually if I forget/login to the client, reboot the Mac or the Windows client -- some amount of messing around -- it comes back. But I'm not getting it this time. Anyone know what causes this and how to fix it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
urza311 Posted August 5, 2005 Author Report Share Posted August 5, 2005 Hmmm. No responses to this post. I've wrangled further with this problem. Tried turning off the client's firewall entirely (despite the fact it had exceptions for Retrospect); tried uninstalling the client, rebooting, then reinstalling the client and rebooting; tried giving the client a different name. All of these meet with the same failure. I have no idea why only these 3 out of my 15 clients are not working, but all it ever shows is "network communication failed". I can't get any more detail, not an error code or anything -- and it *is* communicating because I can change the name, sync the clock, etc. Has anyone got any ideas? This is driving me nuts, and I'm not getting any backups on these clients! Aaargh! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
twickland Posted August 5, 2005 Report Share Posted August 5, 2005 Can we assume that all the clients are in the same subnet? It doesn't sound to me like the problem is with the Retrospect client software per se. I would try playing with the auto-protect settings for your anti-viral software, and perhaps uninstalling and reinstalling these. As you note, you can access the clients; it's just that something on the client computers (likely related to the anti-viral software) is preventing access to the hard drives. We haven't used the v7 client software with our Windows clients, but did have some communications issues with the v6.5 client. On the off-chance that this may be part of the problem, you could try downgrading the troublesome clients to v6.0.110 and see if that helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
urza311 Posted August 6, 2005 Author Report Share Posted August 6, 2005 Yep, all the clients are in the same subnet. All my clients have fixed IP addresses in the 192.168.1.x subnet. I really have no idea why these three aren't working since they share the same antivirus/antispyware software that all the oher clients do, and they're working. It's weird as all get out. I couldn't find the 6.0.110 client on the Dantz FTP site, but I did find 6.5.136, so I can try that next week. If anyone else has any ideas, please throw them at me so that maybe I have some other options to play with on Monday... thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
urza311 Posted August 9, 2005 Author Report Share Posted August 9, 2005 Uninstalling the version 7 clients and going back to using 6.5.136 on these three machines did the trick. Don't know why 7 suddenly went bad on me, but as long as it works, I'm happy... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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