Rule Blocked? BE2012

[Christopher_Jol]

Good Morning,

I have 3 Servers that have 2 jobs on each server.  1 job is configured to backup the SQL server and the other job backs up the entire server minus the SQL selection.  The job that backs up the whole server keeps getting a Job Status of Rule Blocked.  The job is configured to do Differential backups M-F, Full backups weekly on Sat, monthly on the last Sat of the month and yearly on the last sat of the year.

For the life of me I am not able to find anything anywhere regarding the term Rule Blocked.

Thanx in advance!!

Chris

[Christopher_Jol]

Can anyone shed any light on what Rule Blocked means?  That would atleast point me in a direction.

[Colin_Weaver]

Not sure for BE 2012 however in BE 2010 with policies you had rules between the job templates that controlled what happened if 2 templates tried to start a job at the same time (i.e. if you had a weekly job for every Friday and a Monthly job for one Friday a month then you would specify a rule so that when the monthly job runs the weekly job does not - this would how as Blocked by Template Rule.  I think you also saw blocked by template rule if an incrementel was scheduled to start while the full was still running.

In BE 2012 there are hidden rules that state that if you try and start two jobs from the same job definition at the same time then the job with the least frequent interval would win and the other would be blocked. There may also be something about starting a job for a server at the same time as another job is already running for the same server

So my suspicion is that there is something in the stage scheuules of your job definition that is casuing the problem.

[Christopher_Jol · Accepted solution]

More info on this, well I dug into the server configuration area undder Error Handling Rules and found two Rules that were enabled: Recovered Jobs and Checkpoint Restart.  For the time being I have disabled both of those rules.  That leaves all of the error handling rules disabled.

I would agree Colin on the thought process about being blocked by another scheduled job or multiple jobs starting at the same time.  However, I have 1 job that starts at 9PM configured for Overwrite and all my remaining jobs are scheduled for 10PM with append (this keeps my daily jobs all on one tape).  None of the other jobs that run at that time were getting hit.

I am hoping that turning off the error handling rules will clear this up.  I guess I will know tomorrow :o)

[Ben_L_]

Go into your schedule settings for the job, expand out one of the Recurrence settings for either full and click the Calendar button.  This should show you were you have conflicts and what is being blocked or superseded.

[Christopher_Jol]

Ben, I just went in and checked where you suggested and nothing is showing up as conflicting or being blocked or superseded.  I am hoping it was the error rule handling that was causing the issue.

[Ben_L_]

Was this an upgrade or clean install?  If it was an upgrade were these jobs setup this way before the upgrade?

[Christopher_Jol]

This was an upgrade from 2010 R3.  These jobs are the original jobs that were migrated over.

[Christopher_Jol]

I have gone and recreated those jobs just in case that was the problem.  I was not really able to do so earlier as I was concerned that in doing so, the differential job would not run due to needing a full to run first.  The full is scheduled to run tomorrow AM so at this point its a none issue.

[Colin_Weaver]

Ahh yes another one of the hidden rules -  for any differential or incremental to run the full in the same job definition must have run at least once.