Permission denied restoring imported backup

Problem

Trying to restore a backup of a database on a different server than the one were the backup originates generates the following error message: “The operating system returned the error ‘5(failed to retrieve text for this error. Reason: 15105)’ while attempting ‘RestoreContainer::ValidateTargetForCreation’”:

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Analysis

Error 5 is as always access denied. I don’t know why text retrieval fails, but that is a problem for another day Smilefjes.Restores of backups originating from the destination server on the destination server works as expected, and the SQLServer service account have the required permissions granted on both the .bak file and the target folder. Restore of the same backup file on other servers during staging worked as expected. I thus concluded that there had to be some differences between the staging and production servers causing the issue.

  • staging servers are virtual and stand-alone servers, production is a physical cluster
  • staging servers use vm drives as data volumes, production has SAN disks attached to mount points
  • staging has a couple of cores and > 20gigs of ram, production has 16 cores and > 200 gigs

Then it hit me, mount points are renowned for causing strange permission issues due to the fact that the permissions for the mount point and the actual volume mounted are stored separately in different ACLs:

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Further investigation revealed that the service account had full control permissions on both ACLs, but the volume permissions on the data and transaction log volumes were granted via group membership, while the mount point permissions on those volumes were granted explicitly. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for other operations, but when you try to restore a database to a different destination than were it came from, the server account needs explicit permissions on the destination folder(s). That is, when original file name and Restore As are not the same.

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solution

Grant the SQLServer service account explicit permissions on both the volume and the mount point. If you have different mount points for transaction log and data files, you have to do this on both folders. Furthermore, I would guess similar errors could occur if the service account lacks access to the source bak file.

File server memory leak?

Problem

On two of our fileservers (Windows 2008R2) we noticed an increase in memory usage over time. It would start out at say 1.5GiB after a boot, and then slowly work it’s way up to 6GiB, that was the server’s allocated amount of memory (vmware). This being a busy file server due to hosting our user profiles for citrix, we tried increasing the memory allocation to 8GiB. Sadly, this only had the effect that reaching 99% memory usage took longer time after a reboot. After a day or two it would be back up. Further investigation revealed that it also affected performance. Backup took 18 hours for 800GiB, and once in a while it would just give up. Testing also revealed that profile access was sometimes slow.

Continue reading “File server memory leak?”

The Autochanger is disabled

Problem

Når man skal sjekke status på backup i Networker så oppdager man at alle jobber knyttet til et bibliotek fortsatt står på 0% og venter på ledige kasetter, selv om man vet at det ble satt inn dagen før. Biblioteket virker å være i orden, og en omstart av biblioteket hjelper ikke.

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Når man klikker seg inn på biblioteket i Networker får man følgende feilmelding:

“The autochanger is disabled”

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Dersom man høyreklikker på biblioteket og velger Enable/Disable får man styre biblioteket, men backupjobbene går fortsatt ikke.

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Løsninger

Dette er en feil som kan ha flere årsaker.

En kassett sitter fast

I så fall er det gjerne bare ett bibliotek som er kranglete. Kontroller biblioteket fysisk, og sjekk om det sitter fast kassetter i gripearmen eller i båndstasjonene.

Problemer med å aktivere biblioteker

Av og til nekter Networker å lagre at bibliotekene er aktivert. I så fall prøv følgende:

Høyreklikk på biblioteket, velg properties og velg enable der.

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Dersom dette ikke hjelper trengs videre feilsøking.