Network connection to the Backup Exec Remote Agent has been lost. Check for network errors.

[longhorn]

We are running 11d on a fully patched 2003 Windows server and trying to backup using the remote agent on a fully patched 2003 Windows SBS machine.  Exchange is disabled on the SBS box.  We are receiving this message on all of the SBS drives and for the system state:

0xe00084f8 - The network connection to the Backup Exec Remote Agent has been lost. Check for network errors.

The backup of the 2003 server completes just fine.  Watching the SBS server we see the job start and it appears to time out.  Watching from the 2003 server side we see it snag a couple of files then time out.  No files end up on the tape from the SBS server.

We have updated all servers with the latest patches, we have updated the drivers for all network devices.  We have confirmed that the network is functional and we can move large amounts of data between the two devices without issue.  A ntbackup of the SBS box also works without issue as a work around we are doing NTBackup and moving it over the network connection to the 2003 box in a different time frame. 

We have tried setting the priority on the remote agent to below normal and lowest priorities.  We have uninstalled and reinstalled the backupexec software on both machines.  We have run disk defragmenter and checkdisk on both machines. We have tried backing up a subset of the files and receive the same error. We have renamed the file on the SBS machine that relates to SQL backup (as we do not have the SQL agent) to remove the SQL backup errors that appear in the SBS log.

Help!

[Lou_Buffetta]

HI longhorn

It looks like you need an SBS license to backup the system files on an SBS server. Without the SBS license, you can use the Remote Agent license to backup the file system only.

[longhorn]

Hi Lou, thank you for the reply.

We have this exact configuration working at another client site in which we have a backupexec running on a 2003 R2 server connecting to a SBS server using both the remote agent and the Exchange agent.  When we originally deployed that site we tried the reverse with backupexec on the SBS server and a remote agent to the 2003 server and were advised that it had to be the opposite.  The only real difference with this problem site is that we do not have the Exchange agent as they are not using Exchange on the SBS server and it is 2003 R2 rather than 2003.

It would seem that this is something more than a licensing issue in that nothing is backing up (your response suggested that we could backup up the file system).  It also does not make sense that we would have to have two server licenses to back up two servers as it sort of defeats the purpose of the remote agent license.

Can you provide any additional guidance on this issue?

Thanks!