I have an SBS 2003 R2 server (fully patched) that is working extremely well in every respect except for some niggly errors that occur during the SBSBackup process. My backup takes place at midnight - I'm using all the defaults - and backups are sent to an external USB HDD (they are around 12GB at the moment). The backups themselves never fail (or very rarely) but from time-to-time the Performance Report sent to me in the morning contains lots of red shields (I'm beginning to hate them) in the "Critical Errors" and "Critical Errors in Application Log" and all of these errors occur when the SBSBackup process is running - never at any other time.

 

The errors are all related in that an error is generated when the system attempts to backup log files for the following services; during the SBSBackup:

 

DHCP - error message:

tcpsvcs (1740) An attempt to move the file "C:\WINDOWS\System32\dhcp\j50.log" to "C:\WINDOWS\System32\dhcp\j5001250.log" failed with system error 32 (0x00000020): "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. ". The move file operation will fail with error -1032 (0xfffffbf8).

OR:

tcpsvcs (1740) An attempt to move the file "C:\WINDOWS\System32\dhcp\backup\temp\" to "C:\WINDOWS\System32\dhcp\backup\new" failed with system error 5 (0x00000005): "Access is denied. ". The move file operation will fail with error -1032 (0xfffffbf8).

WSUS - error message:

 

Exchange Info Store:

I just read this post on an SBS blog:

 

I ran vssadmin list writers on my server and get the following output - there seems to be a lot of "waiting for completions" in there.. could it be related?

 

Thanks.

----------------

vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001 Microsoft Corp.

Writer name: 'System Writer'
   Writer Id: {e8132975-6f93-4464-a53e-1050253ae220}
   Writer Instance Id: {24db60ed-dd8a-434a-b959-49ced013b538}
   State: Γ] Waiting for completion
   Last error: No error

Writer name: 'MSDEWriter'
   Writer Id: {f8544ac1-0611-4fa5-b04b-f7ee00b03277}
   Writer Instance Id: {6a613d95-970a-493a-84c7-7633d0b8612a}
   State: Ώ] Stable
   Last error: No error

Writer name: 'Event Log Writer'
   Writer Id: {eee8c692-67ed-4250-8d86-390603070d00}
   Writer Instance Id: {3e7fc3bd-98a4-4175-ace5-f01d273fe0d9}
   State: Ώ] Stable
   Last error: No error

Writer name: 'Registry Writer'
   Writer Id: {afbab4a2-367d-4d15-a586-71dbb18f8485}
   Writer Instance Id: {9825dd42-f539-4c02-898a-d7dc0026c2bf}
   State: Ώ] Stable
   Last error: No error

Writer name: 'FRS Writer'
   Writer Id: {d76f5a28-3092-4589-ba48-2958fb88ce29}
   Writer Instance Id: {f314f5f3-1277-4da1-bbe3-eb4591b3dad0}
   State: Γ] Waiting for completion
   Last error: No error

Writer name: 'COM+ REGDB Writer'
   Writer Id: {542da469-d3e1-473c-9f4f-7847f01fc64f}
   Writer Instance Id: {7a2e35e4-23df-41d9-a925-ef08d4e8594c}
   State: Ώ] Stable
   Last error: No error

Writer name: 'Dhcp Jet Writer'
   Writer Id: {be9ac81e-3619-421f-920f-4c6fea9e93ad}
   Writer Instance Id: {3d78deb7-dac9-4b40-86b2-94338bb6b743}
   State: Γ] Waiting for completion
   Last error: No error

Writer name: 'BITS Writer'
   Writer Id: {4969d978-be47-48b0-b100-f328f07ac1e0}
   Writer Instance Id: {9ed85161-d4f4-4558-b69d-8cd9dd50cb12}
   State: Γ] Waiting for completion
   Last error: No error

Writer name: 'WINS Jet Writer'
   Writer Id: {f08c1483-8407-4a26-8c26-6c267a629741}
   Writer Instance Id: {899ae44d-957b-4e0f-9c5f-f19462e36367}
   State: Γ] Waiting for completion
   Last error: No error

Writer name: 'IIS Metabase Writer'
   Writer Id: {59b1f0cf-90ef-465f-9609-6ca8b2938366}
   Writer Instance Id: {ee974ef9-351a-42dd-b1cb-d276857d6da0}
   State: Γ] Waiting for completion
   Last error: No error

Writer name: 'NTDS'
   Writer Id: {b2014c9e-8711-4c5c-a5a9-3cf384484757}
   Writer Instance Id: {ba3ee266-1c2d-4f9d-9236-f1e8dbc904a5}
   State: Ώ] Stable
   Last error: No error

Writer name: 'WMI Writer'
   Writer Id: {a6ad56c2-b509-4e6c-bb19-49d8f43532f0}
   Writer Instance Id: {4e3cbc44-785c-44e4-8cbb-daf30822f097}
   State: Γ] Waiting for completion
   Last error: No error

Hi James,

 

I have the SBS BPA installed and running already (always use it!!). There are no critical errors, only a few warnings (I fixed all the red critical errors a while back). Here's a screen shot of the results: 

 

the only thing it could be I suppose is the old NIC driver... but then again I'm not backing up to a network location... Still SBS seems to be so sensitive about stuff being wrong that I guess it might be that.

 

I'm also troubleshooting this in the sbs newsgroup:

 

But any other insight would be appreciated. I'm beginning to tire of of "fixing" the server each morning!

Thanks.

James

Hi James,

 

Even the warning in BPA need to be addressed. What third party software is installed on the server?

I know this is an old thread, but it is now resolved. It was being caused by the realtime protection on my anti-virus software. It was scanning the following 44MB file every few minutes causing a CPU spike that effectively slowed the server down:

 

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Windows Small Business Server\Support\ConfigurationHelper_Policy.log

 

I had noticed a spike in CPU usage every few mins for about 30-50 seconds, from the "System" process... not much clue there, but using the excellent Process Explorer from sysinternals.com and examining the threads in use on the process "System" I was able to see it was the anti-virus. So, loaded up AV and saw what is was scannign when the CPU spiked. I then excluded the folder from realtime scanning and hey presto, nightly backups have been clean for the past week.

 

Not really the fault of the AV (NOD32 2.7) but I had not seen that particular folder file listed anywhere as needing to be excluded.

 

Anyway, v happy now.. this problem had been going on for a few months.