Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager 12.1 configuration

Just stated to deploy my first SEP 12.1 implementation for a new client and came across a bug whereby the disk space on the system drive where SEPM had been installed was decreasing rapidly.  Investigation showed that the Endpoint Protection Manager is not configured by default to backup or truncate the log files for its database.

For more information from Symantec on the configuration of the truncate and index rebuild options please review the following KB article: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH166658

One other thing that was pointed out by a colleague was that Backup Exec is unable to backup the Database files and you will need to configure SEPM to backup and export the data if you would like to recover the current SEPM configuration in the event of having to restore the server from backup.

To fix this is straightforward but led me to ask the question why Symantec wouldn’t think this needs to be enabled by default for the product.

 

Backup Exec 2012 – One time Exchange Backup doesnt flush transaction logs

I have spent the last few days trying to understand why a successful one time backup hadn’t flushed the transaction logs on my client’s Exchange 2010 server. We spent a lot of time troubleshooting message queues and looking for a transaction that hadn’t completed as the Backup job had reported successful. Digging a bit deeper into some of the job logs I can see that the one-time backup was doing a COPY – Full database and logs and not a FULL – database and flush committed logs.

Googling this came up with the following technote: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH187838 and there is no way that you can change the option to do a full log flush in the one time backup.

I can’t fathom why this wouldn’t be a useful feature of the software to at least have the flush committed logs as a tickbox in the job options for the one-time backup.

Nagios/Opsview: Check Symantec AV Definitions

This morning whilst deploying a modified version of the Symantec Anti-Virus check from MonitoringExchange.org I noticed that on my 64-bit hosts that the check was not returning the correct data and instead of the expected output I was receiving the following error code:

Initially I thought this could be a change due to the new installs being Symantec Endpoint Protection compared to the previous times I had implemented this using Symantec Anti-Virus 10.x but the SEP installs on the 32-bit systems were working fine however the 64-bit versions were not.

A quick look in the registry showed me that the value that is read by the script is not there on the 64-bit version and has been moved to another location (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodeSymantecSharedDefsDefWatch). I sat down with the script and quickly wrote in some extra code that would allow me to change the search path depending on the Operating System Architecture. I also added in some more error checking so if the key didnt exist then rather than exiting with an OK status it returns an UNKNOWN status and a relevant error message.

As I use NSClient++ to enable me to monitor my Windows servers I simply save the script to the NSClient++scripts folder and add the following line into my NSCI.ini under [NRPE Handlers]

Then from within Nagios or Opsview define the command for check_nrpe

check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c check_av -a 2 3

The full script is listed below and is also available on Monitoring Exchange (link):

Backup Exec 12.5 DFS File Restores

I thought that this deserves a special mention.

Backup Exec backs up the DFSr Replicated Folders using the shadow copy components and in the past to perform a restore you were unable to redirect the files to an alternate location. This could cause issues if you wanted to keep both versions of the file as Backup Exec would overwrite the file and then perform an inital replication of that DFSr folder to the other servers in its replication group.

Whilst you could also perform an Authoritative restore of the DFSr folder this has recently caused me even more issues which resulted in support calls to Symantec and Microsoft to follow up on why this happens and what state my DFS is now in as a result of these restores.

During the inital support call to Symantec they advised me that for the first time in Backup Exec you can redirect the files you restore from the Volume Shadow Copy of the DFSr folders. Simply select the server and location in the File Redirection tab in Backup Exec and you will be able to dump the folder structure to whereever you want it and then copy the relevant files back into your DFS structure as you want it.