Windows 2003 Cluster Passive Node shows cached drive letter
I have a windows 2003 file Cluster that finishes with status 1 as a result of "phantom" drive letters. Essentially what it is is when the cluster drives fail over to the the other node, the now passive node still shows the drive letters in windows explorer. If you try to open the drive, you cannot because the data does not exist.
I have the following EEBs that I use on clusters that fail because software installed on the shared disk is not cluster aware, so the job finishes with a status 42, eebinstaller.2140536.1.AMD64 and eebinstaller.2149421.1.AMD64. However, this EEB is to tell the system to ignore the missing disk during the shadow copy backup. The drive letters in this case do not even show up, therefore, it is a completely different issue.
I have searched and searched and the only thing I have found is that this is said to be by design and the drive letters appear because of drive letter caching in Windows Explorer, but it is also not an issue that I see on all of my Windows clusters. For the most part, I only see this on windows 2003 systems.
I am curious if anyone else has experienced this same issue and if they know of any sort of work around. While it does not appear to be a NBU issue, maybe there is a way to tell NBU to skip the non-accessible drive, but I dont know because the drive letter appears, but there is no disk/data to go along with it, so it is simply a "phantom" drive letter.
In the below case, I end up with a status 1 for drives H, I and J
Not really a way around it that i can see - even policy specific exclude lists would put you in a similar position and the ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES directive could then cause a 71 error.
Best practice has always been to use seperate policies: