{"id":5127,"date":"2014-04-25T10:16:19","date_gmt":"2014-04-25T00:16:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=5127"},"modified":"2014-04-25T10:16:19","modified_gmt":"2014-04-25T00:16:19","slug":"a-very-blue-upgrade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2014\/04\/25\/a-very-blue-upgrade\/","title":{"rendered":"A very blue upgrade"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently encountered one of those\u00a0<em>has-to-be-environmental<\/em> errors that\u00a0turned out to be a NetWorker issue. You know\u00a0the one:\u00a0the situation being explained is so straight-forward that there&#8217;s\u00a0<em>no chance<\/em>\u00a0NetWorker\u00a0could be the actual culprit.<\/p>\n<p>Then you investigate.<\/p>\n<p>Then you investigate a little more.<\/p>\n<p>Then you blink slowly and realise it really <em>is<\/em> a NetWorker error.<\/p>\n<p>The case in point was a customer with a VMware environment who reported that simply trying to upgrade NetWorker would result in servers irretrievably blue-screening to the point where it was necessary to recover from\u00a0an image-level backup. That there were other odd issues happening in the environment was obvious:\u00a0the NetWorker server would at times lose access to its own\u00a0<em>nsrdb<\/em> directory, locked out with permissions errors. Virtual machines reported<i>\u00a0corrupt<\/i> sectors on disk, and then there was the blue-screening upgrade.<\/p>\n<p>But after testing against clean images in\u00a0the customer\u00a0environment and then setting up a test\u00a0environment in my lab, this was something wrong with NetWorker.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s\u00a0the scenario:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Windows 2008 R2 server, patched to current patch levels.<\/li>\n<li>Install NetWorker 8.1.0.0 (i.e., 8.1\u00a0vanilla release).<\/li>\n<li>Install NMM 3.0.0 Build 282.<\/li>\n<li>(Use the machine for a while &#8211; or don&#8217;t)<\/li>\n<li>Uninstall NMM 3.0.0 Build 282 in order to install 3.0.1 Build 280.<\/li>\n<li>(Reboot)<\/li>\n<li>While you&#8217;re at it,\u00a0<em>Upgrade<\/em> NetWorker to 8.1.1.[2,3,4].<\/li>\n<li>Install NMM 3.0.1 Build 280, which triggers a reboot<\/li>\n<li>Server bluescreens &#8211; STOP: 0x0000007a error.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In actual fact, you don&#8217;t even need to install NMM 3.0.1 &#8211; the problem is caused by the\u00a0<em>upgrade<\/em> of 8.1.0.0 to a newer 8.1.x.y release.<\/p>\n<p>My guess (and that of a colleague, too), was that this has something to do with the Block Level Backup option in 8.1. In the<i>\u00a0original<\/i> 8.1 release, enabling the BLB option triggered a reboot requirement. Under newer releases\u00a0this doesn&#8217;t seem to be the case.<\/p>\n<p>The solution turned out to be reasonably straight forward once the culprit was identified:\u00a0<em>uninstall<\/em> 8.1.0.0\u00a0first (leaving metadata in place), and then\u00a0<em>install<\/em> the newer 8.1.x.y release.<\/p>\n<p>The problem seems to be limited specifically to those hosts running the original 8.1 release &#8230; subsequent upgrades\u00a0of the client software don&#8217;t\u00a0trigger the issue.<\/p>\n<p>If you installed the base\u00a08.1 release on your Windows 2008 R2 servers &#8230; watch out for this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently encountered one of those\u00a0has-to-be-environmental errors that\u00a0turned out to be a NetWorker issue. You know\u00a0the one:\u00a0the situation being explained&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[1166,182,1053],"class_list":["post-5127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-networker","tag-bluescreen","tag-bug","tag-upgrade"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-1kH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5128,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5127\/revisions\/5128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}