Tag: Server 2012

Symantec Exec 2014 Beta Signups have begun – support for Windows Server 2012 R2

Symantec does not yet support BackupExec Server running on Windows Server 2012. There are a lot of frustrated customers because of this issue. A lot of admins are downgrading to Server 2008 R2 for just this reason. Backup Exec 2014 is slated for late Q2 early Q3 of 2014. Currently BE2012 SP2 running on Server 2008 R2 does have a 2012 client/agent and supports backing up 2012 clients only, but a Backup Exec 2014 beta (aka Backup Exec 2012 R2) signup has started today.

Symantec WS2012 support:
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH196108

Symantec WS2012 support news:
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/backup-exec-2012-r2-update-news-about-windows-server-2012-r2-support-and-target-ga

Blog post released yesterday says BE2014 Beta signups have started:
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/backup-exec-beta-program-important-update

Here is the Beta signup info:

Symantec Backup Exec™ 2014 Beta

Updated – February 20, 2014
We are happy to announce the next beta program for Backup Exec is open for registrations. We are seeking existing Backup Exec customers and Backup Exec prospects who are interested in testing, validating and actively providing feedback on Backup Exec within their labs and/or production environments.

 This new version of Backup Exec delivers one of the most powerful and reliable backup and recovery solutions available today. You can be among the first to see all of Backup Exec’s new features, and your valuable feedback can help shape the future of Backup Exec.

 What’s new in this new release?

Job Monitor is back!
Monitor the status of all of your jobs from one convenient panel
Back up multiple servers in a single job
Customize selections for multiple servers all at once
Configure the order of backup sources
GRT support for Exchange 2013 CU3 & SharePoint 2013
Support for Enterprise Vault 10.0.3 and 10.0.4
Support for Domino 9
New platform support
Windows Server 2012 (agent and Backup Exec server)
Windows Server 2012 R2 (agent and Backup Exec server)
VMware vSphere 5.5
Hyper-V 2012 R2
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2
Simplified upgrade experience
Scheduler enhancements
And much more!
 If you would like to participate in this Beta program, please click on “Join this Beta Program” below.

We look forward to your participation in the Backup Exec Beta.

Kind regards,

Backup Exec @ Symantec

Forward-looking Statements: Any forward-looking indication of plans for products is preliminary and all future release dates are tentative and are subject to change. Any future release of the product or planned modifications to product capability, functionality, or feature are subject to ongoing evaluation by Symantec, and may or may not be implemented and should not be considered firm commitments by Symantec and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.

Requirements
Willing to submit incident reports as problems are discovered in your testing.
Willing to complete a daily journal of your beta activities (some days it may simply be one sentence).
Ability to install the Beta release into a test (non-production) and/or production environment.

Server 2012 R2 SMB (SMB2) Shares inaccessable from 2000, XP SP3, Mac client computers – Solved

Recently a lot of users complained that they could not access or mount or connect to public shares hosted by a newer Server 2012 R2 virtual machine running on Xen. The users all had a common trait that they were trying to access the shares with SMB1 from XP, and OS X on Apple/Mac computers. Windows 7 and other Server 2012 computers could access the shares without any errors. After a lot of testing, the resolution turned out to be a registry change which turned off SMB2. During testing we did the following:

  1. I created test shares on the problem server on both the c and e drives, and still was not able to connect to them with OS X 10.9.1 or XP. Whether trying to mount the shares by UNC or DNS, or IP Address, or mapped drives, I could not mount or view the shares. I modified these new shared directories permissions to see if authentication, security, or permissions were the problem, but no difference. The error message on the Macs was: “There was a problem connecting to the server “servername”. The share does not exist.” and on XP was: “The specified network name is no longer available”.
  2. I created a new share on a separate Server 2012 R2 server. My mac was able to mount this share created on it. This anomaly is what is still vexing because it’s an identical share on an identical operating system, but still the public shares had to be fixed. I looked at differences between the two server’s registries and could not find any discrepancies in the hive located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesLanmanServer. It would be nice for such an occasion to have an easy-to-use tool like linux’ diff, sdiff, or colordiff to compare registries side-by-side, but I digress.
  3. After finding the post by Nicolas Moreno here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/bca317cd-87aa-4fd7-b12a-6715e6dddfe5/cant-access-unc-share-on-windows-server-2012-r2?forum=winserver8gen I checked the good working server and found that it’s server service is using Srv2 (smb2), but it is able to provide shares. Again, the server that can’t share with older clients also was using Srv2 (SMB2), but the symptoms were a lot like the post’s description.
  4. First, I took a snapshot of the virtual machine, I backed up the Registry Hive/Key with an export, and then made the registry change:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesLanmanServerDependOnServiceFrom: SamSS Srv2To: SamSS SrvScreen Shot 2014-02-20 at 10.32.29 AM
  5. After making the change and rebooting the server, all of the clients (2000, 2003, XP, Mac OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, Snow Leopard, Mavericks) could access the shares again.

An associate had made changes to this server prior to the incident cropping up so it’s hard to be sure just when and what caused the SMB2 windows shares to block access, but for now everyone can access the public drives. Please leave a note if this resolution helped or if you found a way to get broken SMB2 shares working again without changing the registry.

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