Suspect ntbackup causing Exchange/DC to "wig out" Any suggestions?
Ok... I have posted a question related to this before. This is the URL to it. https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/23570540/Exchange-server-2003-mailbox-store-and-public-store-crashes.html To recap, During the night, my second DC/Exchange server stops responding, exchange becomes inaccessible, and there are authentication problems all ofver my network. Looking at the trends in the event viewer, when this occurs, the bad event logs ALWAYS start very soon after ntbackup begins backing up my exchange information store. The other post has some errors on it. Here are some more:
application logs start with one of these:
Information Store (3500) First Storage Group: A request to write to the file "C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\mdbdata\E00
then some of these
Microsoft Exchange System Attendant failed to read the membership of group 'cn=Exchange Domain Servers,cn=Users,dc=columb
Please check whether the local computer is a member of the group. If it is not, stop all the Microsoft Exchange services, add the local computer into the group manually and restart all the services.
until it continuously gets a bunch of these:
LDAP Bind was unsuccessful on directory exchange2.columbia.dungane
In DNS logs, at the same time as the others, I get this:
The DNS server has encountered a critical error from the Active Directory. Check that the Active Directory is functioning properly. The extended error debug information (which may be empty) is "00000070: LdapErr: DSID-0C04145C, comment: A jet error was encountered, data fffffbbe, vece". The event data contains the error.
and in the system logs there are errors of all sorts starting around the same time
lots of these:
The Security Account Manager failed a KDC request in an unexpected way. The error is in the data field. The account name was EXCHANGE2$ and lookup type 0x8.
My setup is as follows: I have have 3 HDDs, one is an IDE drive partitioned into two parts, one for the OS, and one to store the backup files that ntbackup creates. The others are 2 SATA drives on a mirrored RAID array, and their sole purpose is to store the information store for exchange.
What I think is happening is that ntbackup is bogging the system down, causing crucial parts of the system not to be able to write to disk, and somehow causin the box (which is a DC) not to be able to talk to the other DC. The only way to make the exchange server work again, and for the clients on the network to authenticate again is to restart, then It works fine for a couple of weeks. Has anyone seen such a thing? What can I do? I'm thinking about moving the exchange to a box that isn't a DC, except I just spent a great deal of time getting RPC over HTTP to work, and don't want to see that go down the tubes. This is causing a lot of late nights and early mornings for me.
application logs start with one of these:
Information Store (3500) First Storage Group: A request to write to the file "C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\mdbdata\E00
then some of these
Microsoft Exchange System Attendant failed to read the membership of group 'cn=Exchange Domain Servers,cn=Users,dc=columb
Please check whether the local computer is a member of the group. If it is not, stop all the Microsoft Exchange services, add the local computer into the group manually and restart all the services.
until it continuously gets a bunch of these:
LDAP Bind was unsuccessful on directory exchange2.columbia.dungane
In DNS logs, at the same time as the others, I get this:
The DNS server has encountered a critical error from the Active Directory. Check that the Active Directory is functioning properly. The extended error debug information (which may be empty) is "00000070: LdapErr: DSID-0C04145C, comment: A jet error was encountered, data fffffbbe, vece". The event data contains the error.
and in the system logs there are errors of all sorts starting around the same time
lots of these:
The Security Account Manager failed a KDC request in an unexpected way. The error is in the data field. The account name was EXCHANGE2$ and lookup type 0x8.
My setup is as follows: I have have 3 HDDs, one is an IDE drive partitioned into two parts, one for the OS, and one to store the backup files that ntbackup creates. The others are 2 SATA drives on a mirrored RAID array, and their sole purpose is to store the information store for exchange.
What I think is happening is that ntbackup is bogging the system down, causing crucial parts of the system not to be able to write to disk, and somehow causin the box (which is a DC) not to be able to talk to the other DC. The only way to make the exchange server work again, and for the clients on the network to authenticate again is to restart, then It works fine for a couple of weeks. Has anyone seen such a thing? What can I do? I'm thinking about moving the exchange to a box that isn't a DC, except I just spent a great deal of time getting RPC over HTTP to work, and don't want to see that go down the tubes. This is causing a lot of late nights and early mornings for me.
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Yeah it works fine across the network, but then you'd be slowing down your Network connection during backups. If its a GB connection this wouldn't matter much. You'd want to set it up with Admin credentials that have write access to the SNAP server in the scheduled task if you wanted to do it across the network. If you want the best performance on the server, I think a separate local drive would be the best (and easiest) way to go.
ASKER
I just went out and got a new HDD for my backups. I'll try it and let you know how it works. Thanks
ASKER
Slapped the new HDD in last night, pointed ntbackup at it, and ran the backup. No errors or warnings whatsoever. I'll probably need a couple of weeks to determine if this fixes it, but I'm sure it will. Thanks.
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