Bill Mullen Posted December 5, 2009 Report Share Posted December 5, 2009 I have been backing up an external Data drive on a client computer for some time. It was set up originally by using the add a source and it showed up in the list of clients. Last Monday it failed to back up so after trying several things I removed the client from the list and then selected add a client, the client did not appear in the client list. I tested the address and it was good so I added the client using add source directly. I then added the source to the script and proceeded to backup; OK! Now a week later I am back to the same client not available. So I repeated the process of adding directly because the client will not show up in the list of clients when I select add a client. In fact no clients show up when I select add a client. Note; I had the same problem with the one other client that I have and I used the same process to allow for a backup. Once removed, neither client, one PC XP and one Leopard mac are unlisted when I select add a client I'm assuming that by adding directly I loose the client when the client restarts and is assigned a new IP, is this a bad assumption? Is there something I need to do to allow the client list to populate with the two available clients rather than add directly? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted December 5, 2009 Report Share Posted December 5, 2009 I'm assuming that by adding directly I loose the client when the client restarts and is assigned a new IP, is this a bad assumption? Nope. You've hit the nail on the head. Is there something I need to do to allow the client list to populate with the two available clients rather than add directly? Yep. There are two ways to fix. (1) arrange to have the client IPs never change. You could either configure the client manually for a fixed IP, or you could set up your DHCP assignment to be from a static map, based on MAC address. If your DHCP server doesn't support that, consider the open source ISC DHCP server, available for just about every platform, including Macintosh: ISC DHCP (2) fix whatever is preventing Retrospect's broadcast mechanism from working to do client discovery. There are articles in the KnowledgeBase that detail the broadcast protocols, etc., used. This could be a software firewall issue somewhere or a configuration / missing support on your switches or routers. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AntonRang Posted December 6, 2009 Report Share Posted December 6, 2009 Something else that will stop the broadcast mechanism from working is if you are connected to a network with a relatively slow DHCP server. On my original Retrospect test system, on my employer's network, it can take 10+ seconds for the DHCP server to respond, which is long enough for Mac OS to self-assign an IP address (which later gets replaced by the DHCP-provided address). When the Retrospect engine starts up, it appears to enumerate all of the known networks. If the DHCP server hadn't responded by the time the engine launches at system startup, the engine won't find any of the clients (because it only knows about the self-assigned IP). Only stopping and restarting the engine would get it to see clients again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Mullen Posted December 6, 2009 Author Report Share Posted December 6, 2009 Russ, Thank you for the advice. It turned out to be a cockpit error. My firewall was set to allow Retrospect access but it was Retrospect 6.1. Once I added Retrospect 8.1 all is well. Bill :laugh: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 Something else that will stop the broadcast mechanism from working is if you are connected to a network with a relatively slow DHCP server. On my original Retrospect test system, on my employer's network, it can take 10+ seconds for the DHCP server to respond, which is long enough for Mac OS to self-assign an IP address (which later gets replaced by the DHCP-provided address). When the Retrospect engine starts up, it appears to enumerate all of the known networks. If the DHCP server hadn't responded by the time the engine launches at system startup, the engine won't find any of the clients (because it only knows about the self-assigned IP). Only stopping and restarting the engine would get it to see clients again. I hadn't thought of that one because our servers aren't that slow. Never heard of a DHCP server taking that long to assign an IP. Must be a real challenge to reboot a machine on that network and get it on the subnet. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
impala Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 ahha! maybe thats why my server doesn't work after a reboot until I manually stop and start it. Nothing I can do about it on the network side. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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