Symantec

Release Update 4 for Symantec EndPoint 12.1 is now available. It can be downloaded from FileConnect by customers with current maintenance and as a trial from the public site for those that wish to try it out.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1.4 has added support for a number of new operating systems including:

• Windows Server 2012 Release 2 (R2)
• Windows 8.1
• Mac OSX 10.9

In addition to this, there have been a lot of features added on the Mac OS side. Symantec had seen a dramatic rise in malware targeted towards the Mac and 12.1.4 is the response to that. One such example was the Flashback virus which affected approximately 600,000 Mac computers back in 2012. In fact, Symantec reports that the number of malware variants in 2012 almost doubled for the Mac. Symantec proposes that this huge increase in Mac malware coincides with Apple’s continued market share growth, especially in the enterprise. As this market share continues to grow Symantec estimates so will the malware variants.

To combat this growing threat Symantec now offers Network Threat Protection for the Mac. This was previously a feature that was only available on the PC. The inclusion of Network Threat Protection now gives Mac users a powerful best-in-class Intrusion Prevention System. This provides an additional layer of security to the already powerful antivirus and anti-malware engines.

V-79-57344-38273 – Final error: 0xe0009581 – Cannot get the virtual machine XML information.

This error can be caused by a number of problems but in my case, it was a very simple fix and, it may be for you too. This error occurred after I renamed one of my virtual machines. However, selections for both the new name and the old name still existed in the Backup Exec job. These selections did not show in the GUI. To fix this issue I had to remove the old names from the Backup Details tab. This is the text-based representation of the Backup Selections.

V-79-10000-11226 – VSS Snapshot error. The Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshot provider selected returned: “Unexpected provider error”.

I was receiving this error in Backup Exec 2010 R3 while trying to back up a virtualized Exchange 2010 server. This error seemed a little odd, so first I ran VSSADMIN LIST WRITERS from the command prompt  I verified all my writers were listed as “Stable” and all reported “No Errors”. I then ran VSSADMIN LIST PROVIDERS and immediately identified my problem.

V-79-57344-38278 – Unable to find the metadata for a disk of the virtual machine.

I recently received this error in Backup Exec 2010 when I selected to back up a Template. This template existed on a VMware ESXi 5.1 cluster. I was using the Agent for VMware and backing up through VCenter using the NBD method. Being a template, it was offline and did not have a Remote Agent installed.

The problem I discovered was that I had used a special character in the building of this machine. Being that this was a template, which I planned to deploy many virtual machines from, I wanted to easily attach a date in its name. Mostly, I did this so I knew how far out it was on Windows Updates. So I named by Template, “Base Win2K8 SP1 (6/20/13)”.

A while back I posted about Service Pack 2 for Backup Exec 2012 and Service Pack 3 for Backup Exec 2010 being in beta. Well, testing is over and the day has come. Both service packs have been released. And this is what they include.

V-79-57344-65072 – The connection to target system has been lost. Backup set canceled.

I ran into this error recently at one of my clients with their new Backup Exec 2012 implementation. The jobs would sometimes work, but mostly they would fail with the error above. They would also fail at seemingly random byte counts. The implementation was backing up two servers. One of the servers was also the media server and this local backup always succeeded as expected and without incident. The other server, the one that was often failing, was the one with the remote agent.

This made me quickly look towards the network. As a test, I kicked off the problematic backup and monitored the network bandwidth usage in Task Manager on both servers. I also had a continuous ping going between the two servers. The first thing that became apparent was that the network bandwidth (100Mb switch) was completely saturated during the backup. Both servers continually reported a steady hold at 100% network utilization.

Then it happened. At first, I saw the continuous ping start to fail between the two servers. Then I noticed the network links as being reported down on both servers. I could only assume at this point the switch that connected these two servers together was having problems. I logged into the switch and checked the uptime. Lo and behold the switches uptime was just a couple of minutes. I repeated this test a few more times and even tried different switch ports and network cables. Same result every time. The switch kept rebooting. I could only assume this older switch could not handle the constant 100% network load.