Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs Forum

The above quote is from a Symantec support article. I hate, loathe, despise Symantec products but I am stuck with Backup Exec which was an awesome product before Veritas was bought by Symantec.

We recently had a tape drive fail on our server at work. Bought a new drive and 5 tape sets because the new drive could read our old tapes but cannot write to them. After installing the tape drive I discovered that our older Version of Veritas would not write to the drive so I had to install the Symantec version of Backup Exec which came with the drive. Now my error log on the server fills up. The errors relate to remotebe.exe cannot start. I searched through Symantecs website and I think my problem is what the quote above references. However all backups are local to the server. I do not need to pull anything in remotely. I would like to stop remotebe from launching but I cannot find where it is starting. Disabling the service didn't work and after thinking about it I should have known it wouldn't work. I also want to uninstall live update but I am concerned that it will boink something else. I did get a good backup even with the error log full of remotebe.exe issues.

So my first question is: How do I stop remotebe.exe from running or being called.

Secondly, If Backup exec can provide me with dependable backups and runs fine without errors, I really don't want "Live Update" poking around with Administrator privledges. Once it starts to run dependably I feel that updating is unnecessary. Do you agree?

Third, should I just blow away Backup Exec and use NT backup? I think I read once that NT backup is a stripped version of Veritas. Any reason not to use NT backup? Will it write to a scsi tape drive?

Thanks in advance for your time.

That would require modifying the program, and without help from Symantec, that would be very difficult. You'd basically have to reverse engineer and hack the code. I used to use a program called Sourcer for reverse engineering: http://www.tbc.net/~clive/vcomwinp.html


Agreed. Install, update once, then kill liveupdate.

That would be up to you, I use NTbackup, which works fine for me.

That is true.

Not to my knowledge.

Yes, I used it for many years with various SCSI DAT drives.

Scott.

Well now the plot thickens.

I have had successful backups all week with the Symantec Backup Exec. The error log eventually quit filling up. I noticed early in the week that the PF Usage in task manager had bumped up to near Physical memory amount. The server has 656MB of RAM and usually ran around 256MB before I installed the Symantec. Wednesday I saw the Windows dialog box that Windows was increasing the size of the page file--my blood started to boil. Opened up task manager and saw the memory usage now up to 1.4GB on a 656MB system. One occurrence of svchost is the culprit. I am going in early tomorrow (Saturday--thanks Symantec) with my Sysinternals tools and try to carve out and lay the smack down on the offending services.

My first question is; Do you have any advice to offer.

Secondly, Since you have experience with NTBackup, will the tape auto eject after the session is complete? I backup the server every day except Sat & Sun. I saw no option in the schedule to cancel those days. The closest option was daily. Will Friday's tape get written to 3 times before it is removed Monday morning? I also did not see the option to select an overwrite protection period for the tape. Does Server 2000 NTBackup have Shadow Copy? Is there a program that you would recommend for a DAT backup?

Third, will you post my bond if I ever have the opportunity to meet a spammer or a Symantec programmer?

The only advice I might have off the cuff is to reboot and/or reload the server. The latter is obviously not a quick fix, but I don't know how long it's been since it had been loaded, and what had been done to it since.

I'd definitely check every task that is running, and verify what it does and whether it should be there. The Sysinternals tools will help with that (Process Manager and Autoruns especially).

Re: NTbackup and tape drives, I do seem to remember that the tape automatically rewinds and ejects, then the program asks for another.

I believe you can create 5 scheduled weekly jobs, one for each day of the week.

You can have a backup append or replace, overwrite protection is enabled by setting the write protect switch on the tape itself.

I believe Volume Shadow Copy was introduced with XP.

Unfortunately I don't have enough experience with other programs to be able to offer a qualified recommendation.

I hear you about the bond. <g> Scott.

I thought I would give you an update.

I ran Live Update several times and installed many updates for the Backup Exec program. Same problem. Every day the memory usage gets worse and uses huge amounts (in my opinion) of the page file. It keeps ramping up until the backups fail and the server is brought to its knees. It usually takes 4 days.

I went to Symantec's knowledge base (that has to be the best oxymoron ever). Guess what. There is a known memory leak!! Guess what the fix is. I have to write a batch file to start and stop the service and load it as a scheduled task. No patch. No update. No fix. I have to fix the problem.

Hopefully Symantec will put themselves out of business.

Wow. I sure hope there are better alternatives to that software. Scott.

I think I am going to use NT Backup and be done with it. No frills, bells and whistles but hopefully no memory leaks either. I came in at 5:00am today to do just that.