Problem of the week

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OK, as promissed, the problem of the week. This thread is meant to be a start of getting your trouble shooting had's on and try to figure out what the problem is and (as an ultimate goal) how to solve it.
To activate you resolving properties I suggest you do not use google to find the answer. That would just spoil the fun.
I'll start with the first problem. If someone else also has a headbreaking problem and knows the answer, feel free to join the club.
Maybe we could make a special category for this. (admins: hint hint).
Ok, here we go:

This happened to a friend of mine. It costed me a few day to figure it out.

Paul is an admin in a mixed Microsoft-Novell network. As tapestreamers as expensive for a small company, he only had 1 tapestreamer connected to a NT machine, so he desided to back up all vital info from all servers on this one tapedevise.
He creates an account on the novell server called administrator, makes it a member of the group NTGATEWAY and gives it the proper rights in the directories with the vital files. He then creates a mapping to the Novell server and starts the backup. Their is no problem. He can backup the files from the novell server.
He then writes a script (cmd file) to create the mappings, make the backups and after that removing the mappings again.
The script works perfect.
Convinced that it was OK, he scedules the script to run at 20:00 hours.
Next morning the backup of the NT servers where OK, but the Novell servers failed.
He examened the script and run it again.
Worked like a charm: All novell servers participated in the backup. But again the sceduled job failed for the novell servers.

Good luck!

 

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When he runs the backup test he is logged into the NT server as an administrator yes?
So by setting up the backup job he would be assigning the NT administrator account to run it.
What account is specified during this backup setup to use while connecting to the novel server?

 

I do not know novell so all i can think is about the two job scheduled are overlapping. For example one start at 19.00 and finish at 21:00, and the other start at 20:00 and finish at 22:00.
So when the second job start it cab find the tape busy

 

He created a account called administrator on the novell server and made it a member of the NTGateway group, remember? So that part is covered. Also, it worked when started direct, only when sceduled it failed.

 

There is only one scheduled job. No way of overlapping.
The script looked something like this:

net use g: \\novellserver\data:vitaldata
net use h: \\novelserver2\data:vitaltoo
net use j: \\ntserver\data\vital1
net use k: \\ntserver2\data\vitalalso
call backup.bat
net use k: -delete
net use j: -delete
net use h: -delete
net use g: -delete

backup.bat then had the NTBackup command to backup drives g:, h:, j: and k:.
When the backup was done, the controle was passed back to the calling script.
The script was OK, it worked.

 

Good fun !
Maybe the novell user need some permission to run scheduled job, or the task has to be enabled.
Is the job starting and give an error or does not start at all ?
If is working out of the schedule must be something like that
Nico

 

I havent used Novell for 10 years but are the backup files being deleted before the schedule tape backup runs.

 

The scheduling itself is run by NT and by novell.

 

No, nothing is deleted except the mapping to the files and that happens only after the backup has run.

 

Only other thing I can think of is, because the user has run the back up manually then the schedule doesnt run because its already been done.

Otherwise I am a bit stumped

 

Is it not possible to make a backup twice? That's not the problem. I'll give one clue: The first responder (ManicMonkey) was the closest but just missed the nail.
By the way, the NT servers were NT4 and the Novell servers were 3.12. Not that that matters a lot.

 

I am really stumped.

does both servers not have to have the same rights i.e administrator rights to do this?

So it should be on the script otherwise the schedule will fail as it needs full access rights to be able to do it, or am I too far of the mark.

 

Expansion of my original post.
2 administrative accounts - one for Novel and one for NT, if the job is to run on both the nt and novel then surely both these accounts need to be entered into the actual job not just created on each server, otherwise the novel or nt server will be trying to run a batch backup with invalid credentials.

Just somit id check cos ive seen it before

(kinda what greenbrucelee was hinting at i think)

 

It was just something that popped into my head after re-reading your ealier post, seems kinda obvious now.

But then again having not used Novel since 1997 I hope youll excuse me for forgetting a couple of things

 

The job does not "run" on the novell server. The administrator account on novell is only needed to make the connection. It is not there for the scheduled job.
You're searching in the wrong direction.

 

In the problem I wrote that the correct rights were given.

 

Then at least *some* files should have been backed up.

 

No, not needed. You only need the NTgateway group in Novell and the rights are given to that group.