Jump to content

Manually unloading service


Recommended Posts

Greetings,

 

Looking for a manual means of unloading the services of retrospect software.

 

Killing process' from terminal, I would think, is the least preferred method. "Why slam it into park, when the brakes still function." Hence, I seek a more "proper" means.

 

It is a "quick" one-time thing so the firmware of our exabyte (firewire) can be updated.

 

Thanks

 

retrospect v6.1.126

OS X Server 10.4.7

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Waltr,

 

"services" being... the background instance(s) of the retrospect software running when the application is not running in the 'finder' window of OS X. My concern is that some part of software is still active in order to initiate scheduled jobs, etc.

 

Even after choosing file --> quit; the process called "RetroRun" is seen when executing the 'top' command in terminal.

 

In order to update exabyte VXA firmware, all instances of backup software must be stopped to prevent any "whoopsies". Looking for the quickest means of ensuring all retrospect services are stopped.

 

thanks

Link to comment
Share on other sites

hi kz,

 

the "RetroRun" process is only for scheduling. it does not directly access the AutoLoader. i think you'd be ok leaving that running.

 

HOWEVER-->you could go to 'Special->Preferences->Notification' and uncheck the 'Automatically launch Retrospect'. once you uncheck that and quit Retrospect, there should be no 'RetroRun'.

 

just remember to reenable after you are done. this would assure that no scheduled Scripts would take off while you are updating the firmware.

 

cheers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote:

 

 

HOWEVER-->you could go to 'Special->Preferences->Notification' and uncheck the 'Automatically launch Retrospect'. once you uncheck that and quit Retrospect, there should be no 'RetroRun'.

 

 

 


 

Hmmm..

FYI, I did the above and RetroRun is still running. I then adjusted the "look ahead" time to 1 hour to ensure this might have been preventing this "non-client" software from unloading.

 

This had no effect either.

 

I agree with your thinking the process is most likely harmless... but paranoia has gotten the best of me. I have another Xserve with no BU software... to be safe, I will just plug into that for the firmware update process.

 

Thanks for all your input

 

Good day

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Kzinnack,

 

It's not necessary to stop the RetroRun process to update Exabyte VXA firmware using the vxatool. However, you are right to not want Retrospect running, so what I do is to go to the Retrospect Schedule (in Preferences) and click the Never button to prevent autolaunch while the update is being done. That's what we do on our Xserve G5 (10.4.7 Server) when we update our Exabyte VXA-2 1x10 1u (SCSI) with Atto UL4D.

 

As a comment, I'm not sure that the Exabyte VXA-2 firmware 210E is good - we are seeing problems with the error recovery routines as compared to 210D (tapes moved into the drive appear as erased or unrecognized content, fixed by eject, cleaning cycle, reinsert). I'm still doing testing and regression testing because it's only something that happens about once a week, but it definitely started with the 210D to 210E firmware update.

 

Also, if you have the autoloader version, there's a cosmetic bug in that the front panel display doesn't show the updated firmware version until you power cycle the autoloader - it gets the drive firmware version only on power up self test. I turned in a bug report about a year ago on this to Exabyte.

 

Russ

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote:

If you wouldn't mind, could you keep me posted on your testing results??

 


 

Sure. I'm trying to be very careful in my regression testing so as to isolate the variables. But it's such an infrequent occurrence that it's a bit hard to get conclusive results. Lots of data moving around, takes a while...

 

russ

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote:

FYI, I did the above and RetroRun is still running.

 


 

retrorun will always run when the Retrospect runs, no matter the Preference setting. If you unchecked the correct Preference and quit the program and retrorun didn't die, slam it into park. It's a well behaved unix daemon that won't even remember the insult the next time it launches.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...