Travis Kensil - Church I.T.

Thought my VSS issues were gone; no such luck. After some more testing it appears to be something in MozyPro causing VSS failures. At first I thought the issue was solved but it is back, on a different server. I am now narrowing on MOzy because I have another server not running Mozy and have had no issues. The common variable always seems to be once MOzy gets installed things start going badly. Our EMS box was running for 6 months, virtualized of course, without Mozy and no issues; I installed Mozy 3 weeks ago, after week 2 logs show the VSS service randomly quit working, failed backups with it. My next step is to collect additional data and begin working with Mozy to see if this is a bug on their end. From the comments/emails it appears I am not the only one with this issue; if you are having the issue please email me so I can let Mozy know this is not an isolated incident. Thanks!

One of the cool parts of my after-hours consulting gig is that I get to see, fix and document lots of weird/uncommon issues. So with that said, I have created a new category for “Bugs/Issues” where I can document these things not only for my benefit but possibly for yours. Yesterday marks another weird one.

One of my consulting customers is a 30+ staff office running Exchange 2003. One of their sales guys could never seem to open forwarded attachments. Initially I made the assumption it was just the security settings in Outlook preventing it from opening; checked those and everything was fine. I then did a simple repair/detect operation thinking something was possibly corrupt in Outlook; no improvement. I tried and was successful at opening the attachments myself in Outlook….which began to make be believe there could be some sort of plugin/3rd party product on the client machine causing this behavior.

Going back about 6 months ago I discovered that Apple iTunes installs this nifty little plugin inside of Outlook that when using IMAP causes Outlook extreme delays in startup/sync.

So with that previous knowledge from the past, I went and checked the com-addins and addins section of Outlook. I noticed two entries, Google and iTunes. After removing both entries and restarting Outlook; the staff member was immediately able to open/view messages/forwards. After some process of elimination I determined the Google plugin was the offending object. After some further research it appears there is a known bug between Google/Outlook. So with that said, here is the official bug fix…

1) Launch Outlook (so far this appears to be an issue in 2003, not sure about newer/older verions)
2) Click on Tools - Options - Other - Advanced
3) Remove Google Toolbar Tick in both Ad-In Manager and Com Ad-Ins (I actually just chose to completely remove them but either way should work)
4) Restart Outlook

Also as I mentioned, the same process about applies to fix a slow load/sync in Outlook when using IMAP protocol for your mail. Instead of removing Google remove the iTunes plugin.

Just thought I would post this in case anyone else has this issue…

About three weeks ago I noticed some of our backups and most importantly MozyPRO was having issues completing successful backups. After some investigations I found a series of random VSS errors in the logs; Microsoft and random Google searches didn’t really turn up anything of use. I also noticed that the VSS service seemed to randomly stop running and never automatically restart itself again.

In the past I have had success, when the print spooler service exhibited similiar symptoms, in simply stopping the service and grabbing a “good” version of the spooler file from either the windows disk or another workstation and simply overwriting the file, rebooting. My similiar logic applied in this scenario.

I stopped the VSS service, grabbed a “good” working copy from another one of our servers, replaced the existing and performed a reboot. So far so good…I have not seen any errors/issues currently because of this. The real test will be later tonight once our main backups and Mozy begin running….both which heavily utilize VSS.

I have not had much time to investigate how this issue begins or what causes it. I know some variables seem to be…

- An installation of Retrospect backup software (specifically the version for use with the Odyssey (http://www.imation.com/products/odyssey/index.html Removeable Hard Disk system)
- The MozyPRO client

I do believe the issue started after an unsuccessful install of the Odyssey product and somehow corrupted VSS. I want to do further testing to see if it was caused by Retrospect itself or some goofy driver issue. The problem definitely seemed to start once we attempted install of the Odyssey product.

Anyone else using an Odyssey hard disk product, install the software and wound up with a corrupt VSS service? I’ll keep this post updated as I discover more info. about this issue.