Simpana 9 – Check Readiness on Windows, Linux and Macintosh passes although backups fail

Came across an interesting thing today and thought I would publish it, as it could certainly catch people out.

You’ll find the Client Readiness Check will pass on Windows, Linux and Macintosh clients (those I have checked so far), although you backup fails against the hosts with the error similar to below at the 5% mark.

Error Code: [19:599] 
Description: Loss of control process ifind.exe. 
Possible causes: 
1. The control process has unexpectedly died. Check Dr Watson log or core file.
2. The communication to the control process machine wentx862k8-1 might have gone down due to network errors. 
3. If the machine wentx862k8-1 is a cluster, it may have failed over. 
4. The machine wentx862k8-1 may have rebooted.

And readiness check against the client will pass as per below;

It appears the readiness check doesn’t actually check all services/processes on the client required to perform the backup. i.e. In this situation, I killed the EvMgrC process, which is certainly required, it’s as important the cvd process for the client to function and be backed up. Without it, the backup will fail to work, however as you can see Readiness Check will pass for the client, as it looks like EvMgrC is not actual checked.

Of course it’s rare for this EvMgrC to be unavailable like this, however it certainly could happen and cause confusion when client readiness check is performed and clearly says everything is okay.

On Windows clients be sure to check that the essential services are running, and on Unix platforms run the following command to ensure the key items have an associated PID.

# cd /opt/simpana/Base
# ./simpana list
+---------------------------------+---------+----------------------------------+
| Service name                    |   PID   | Service command                  |
+---------------------------------+---------+----------------------------------+
| cvlaunchd                       | 4020    | /opt/simpana/Base/cvlaunchd      |
+---------------------------------+---------+----------------------------------+
| cvd                             | 4091    | /opt/simpana/Base/cvd            |
+---------------------------------+---------+----------------------------------+
| EvMgrC                          | 4085    | /opt/simpana/Base/EvMgrC         |
+---------------------------------+---------+----------------------------------+

Hope this helps anyone in the internet that might come across this. This type of failure can be seen with the following error message reported in the FileScan.log on the client too as outlined below, good indication of the issue probably being as described.

3044 be8 11/15 19:28:01 ### EvSocket::doConnect() - Could not connect to wentx862k8-1(wentx862k8-1):EvMgrC: Connect to 127.0.0.1:8402 failed: Connection refused

Although it appears that Windows clients appear to recover the EvMgrC process after a period of time, so it should correct itself, however not seen that same behaviour on Linux and/or Macintosh clients as yet. Will keep investigating if they too recovery it.

Comments

2 responses to “Simpana 9 – Check Readiness on Windows, Linux and Macintosh passes although backups fail”

  1. EuJin Avatar
    EuJin

    Hi. I would like to know what command does it trigger if we click on “check readiness” on the client? Reason I am asking this is that I will be using cli to manage the backups of clients. Please advice… Thank You.

    1. michaelf Avatar
      michaelf

      Hello,

      I don’t understand your question to be honest. As to what it triggers, it does cvnetchk’s as seen in the logs, which does checks between the components. i.e. commserve, mediaagent (to be used based on Storage Policy) and client.

      Thanks

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