Posted-Date: Sat, 05 Sep 92 21:51 EST
X-Vers: CCMail to SMTP translator by Alan Marshall vers 2.69 9/3/92
Organization: Proteon, Inc., Westborough, MA  01581  [(508)898-2800]
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.novell
Date:         Sat, 5 Sep 1992 21:13:00 EST
Reply-To:     Novell LAN Interest Group <NOVELL@SUVM.BITNET>
From:         Fund@RELAY.PROTEON.COM
Subject: Re: Looking for great tape backup software.

>$I have used arcserve and it works fine. We run it on a FS and we backup yhe FS
>$DOS Workstations and OS/2 workstations. It can be controlled from any WS.

>   We recommend ARCserve to all of our clients.  However, we have now
>twice seen a strange problem that is making me wonder if ARCserve is
>100% stable.

>   In both cases, the server was running NetWare 3.1x (one was 3.10,
>and I don't know what the other was running) using duplexed disks,
>with the tape drive attached to one of the disk channels.  In both
>cases, after a long period of continuous uptime (something in the
>half-year range, roughly), ARCserve failed with an error message
>about being unable to allocate buffers.  Over the next few hours,
>the servers' hard drive became corrupted (any file that was written
>to became filled with garbage, and NetWare's FATs and directories
>became garbled).  Later in the day, the system ABENDed.  One of them
>was salvageable with VREPAIR (hint:  ALWAYS put this NLM in your
>boot partition so it's there when you need it), while the other
>was so messed up that it required a complete reinstallation of
>NetWare.

>   I have not seen this problem on any of the other NetWare 386 servers
>I have administered, and in neither case did I see the ABEND message
>(e.g. the client didn't write it down before rebooting).  I can't say
>for sure that ARCserve was involved in the problem, nor can I say for
>sure that it had anything to do with duplexing; however, I have not seen
>this problem on systems running ARCserve or duplexing but not both.

>   Has anyone else seen anything similar?

>stephen@bokonon.UUCP      ...!{uunet,xrtll,becker.gts.org}!bokonon!stephen

   I have nothing confirmed, but we have occasionally seen an error
   similar to yours and we have had an occasional abend.  As in your
   case, this seems to happen after the ArcServe NLMs have been up
   for an extended period of time.

   So... what we did is we took them out of the AUTOEXEC.NCF.

   We created two addtional text file NCF files called ARC.NCF and UNARC.NCF.
   The ARC.NCF loads the board driver and the ARCServe NLMS.  The UNARC.NCF
   unloads the NLMS.  Once a week we simply type UNARC at the file server
   console (or through RCONSOLE) and then ARC.  This takes less than a minute
   to do, and appears to keep everything just fine and dandy.

     Glenn Fund                           Internet:   Fund@Relay.proteon.com
     Principal Research Specialist        CompuServe: 75170,1060
     Lockheed Sanders                     cc:Mail     Fund at Proteonwebo
     DW Highway South                     Phone:      (603) 885-6242
     MS NHQ4-0405                         President of The Greater Boston Area
     Nashua, NH  03061                    Novell Users Group.
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