Idera (formerly R1Soft) have advised all customers of an unforeseen issue effecting their Server Backup software (formerly CDP), which has been introduced in version 5.2. The issue occurs when Server Backup Agents (SBA) are upgraded to 5.2 before the Server Backup Manager’s (SBM) are updated to this version due to a change in the way mount points are discovered.

In the latest Server Backup 5.2 release, support was added for the ‘Cloud Server 6’ platform. This has reportedly changed the way Server Backup Agent’s discovers mount points. Earlier versions of SBM below v5.2 and previous CDP versions 3.x & 4.x stored the information in a different way. When Server Backup Agents are running on a higher version than the Server Backup Manager itself, the agent is unable to communicate mount points correctly ie. Client is out of Sync with the Server.

A potentially major problem when Server Backup Agents are installed & managed by yum – which means any yum update run on a client machine will update the Idera SBA version ahead of the backup server, introducing this bug.

Description of the Version 5.2 Mount Point Bug from Idera:

• Due to a change in the way the version 5.2 Agent discovers mount points, customers who back up a system which has devices with a lot of mount points, such as loop back devices, were experiencing errors with the 5.2 Agent communicating with SBM 5.0.2 and lower.
• In rare instances with SBM 5.2, for disk safes with very large amounts of metadata, the discovery data is written correctly but SBM cannot read the recovery point.  So you will see failed merge tasks or notice that you can’t browse the recovery point. The resolution for this issue is in testing here at Idera and at one customer site.

We have previously written about the clustered R1Soft backup options that we’ve deployed for Crucial customers, which runs automated nightly backups for a huge number of our customers. Whilst we have only noted a small percentage of customers experiencing genuine backup issues, requiring advanced support from Idera Server Backup tech’s — on the whole the vast majority of customers run smoothly year round. However, this certainly highlights how important compatibility testing is when releasing new software versions.

Unfortunately, in this instance it has created a slight snowball effect as more & more customer backups reported as failing. On the bright side of things, only a small number of customer backups were initially impacted. This gave us a small amount of time and in escalating these issues to Idera we have helped to identify and resolve the problem, successfully trialling the temporary ‘hot-fix’ over the last few days which we continue to apply to customers with backup failures.

The ‘hot-fix’ script manually makes necessary modifications to the backup disk safe on the server side to restore server-agent communication between versions. So far it has proved successful for effected customers. The issue is identifiable when a backup policy fails with the following error being reported in logs:

“500 ERROR – A truncation error was encountered trying to shrink VARCHAR () FOR BIT DATA ‘(Binary data value not displayed)’ to length 255.”

Any Idera SBM admins experiencing this issue should contact Idera Support for the supplied hot-fix.

Idera have also sent notices to all customers regarding this bug and that a fix will be pushed out in version 5.2.1 by May 13th.