Exchange Server Pro » Symantec

To my dearest Symantec…

Paul Cunningham — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 23:08:07 +0000

Please make your website work like the rest of the internet.

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Symantec Endpoint Protection is a Network Performance Threat

Paul Cunningham — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 01:00:03 +0000

I recently removed the Network Threat Protection component from the Symantec Endpoint Protection installation on all of the servers and desktops on a customer network. Here is a list of things that happened as a result:

Backup throughput increased by 50% (using Symantec Backup Exec 11d)
Exchange backups stopped failing due to the remote agent becoming disconnected
Performance of SQL-based applications improved
Group Policy processing time at desktop startup decreased
LDAP search query times for the Exchange server improved (System Center Essentials was raising alarms for these taking over 6000ms sustained for 5 minutes, with the alarm threshold being 100ms)
RPC latency for the Exchange server improved (SCE was raising alarms for average latency being over 70ms sustained for 5 minutes)
Office applications opening files on network shares became more responsive
Desktops stopped rebooting randomly throughout the day

Seriously, what a piece of junk.

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Backup Exec 11D jobs fail after Exchange Server 2007 SP1 upgrade

Paul Cunningham — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:33:48 +0000

After upgrading your Exchange Server 2007 system to Service Pack 1 you may experience Backup Exec job failures for your Exchange backups. The following error may appear in your Backup Exec job logs.

Unable to complete the operation for the selected resource using the specified options. The following error was returned when opening the Exchange Database file: ‘-514 The version of the log file is not compatible with the ESE version. ‘

Symantec has detailed the cause of the issue here.

The above error is reported if the version of the ESE.DLL on the Backup Exec server is different from the one on the Exchange 2007 server. This occurs in the event that the Exchange 2007 server has been patched to recent updates like Service Packs/ Rollup Patches for Exchange but the same Service Packs/Rollup Patches have not been applied to the Exchange 2007 Management Tools installed on the Backup Exec server.

To resolve the issue simply update the Exchange Server 2007 management tools on your Backup Exec server by running the Exchange Server 2007 SP1 setup on the server. Note: if your Backup Exec server runs on 32-bit Windows you will need to download the 32-bit version of Exchange Server 2007 to run the management tools install.

I’ve performed this update on a production system and found the backup job begins working again without requiring a restart of any services on either of the Backup Exec or the Exchange Server 2007 servers.

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Symantec Backup Exec 11d Double-backslash Bug

Paul Cunningham — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 06:13:06 +0000

On a Symantec Backup Exec 11d server that is backing up Microsoft SQL Server databases you may encounter failed backups with an error:

The path for this database is invalid because it contains extra backslash characters. You must remove the extra backslash characters before the database can be backed up.

The solution provided by Symantec is here, and references instructions from Microsoft here on detaching and reattaching the database with the correct path.

In some cases the database in question will actually be the Symantec Backup Exec database created by the installation. The database is usually named “BEDB”. In these cases you may follow the instructions above, and then find that the problem returns after the next backup is run. In the case I worked on no matter how many times I detached and reattached the database to remove the extra backslashes in the paths, the problem would return.

I found the solution to be a registry change on the Symantec Backup Exec server. In the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Symantec\Backup Exec For Windows\BEDatabase look for the values “Server Database Path” and “Server Database Log Path“. If these values have trailing backslashes like so:

“Server Database Path”=”E:\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Data\”
“Server Database Log Path”=”D:\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Data\”

then remove them so that they appear like this instead:

“Server Database Path”=”E:\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Data”
“Server Database Log Path”=”D:\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Data”

You should now find that the documented solution from Symantec works properly.

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Exchange Server Pro » Symantec

To my dearest Symantec…

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