Just to keep running with this, Ive installed an engineering version of nbpem. The day following the patch, my problem remained: my conclusion - the patch didnt fix my problem.
Then for a few days everything ran as expected. Then one day nothing ran at all even via cron.
Following a restart of nbpem and a couple of other daemons everything has worked as normal. This I consider to be a different problem to my original problem of just a few occasional backups missing.
This I dont feel to be a fixed problem - if after patching the problem persists ( as it did ) then the problem hasnt been fixed and no argument.
I wouldnt rely too much on what nbpemreq tells you: for a start the man page doesnt match the actual list of arguments but more worryingly its just wrong:
nbpemreq -predict_all -client_filter sap-node-a -date 09/23/2008 17:00:00
Predicted worklist including all jobs due to run between now and Tue Sep 23 17:00:00 2008
00 sap-node-a Daily_SAP_Online_A SAP_Daily 0 Mon Sep 22 15:00:00 2008
so its saying it'll run on the 22nd (correct) but it should also run on the 23rd.
Once the job has run on the 22nd, if you issue the command again , then it will tell you it will run on the 23rd. So either Ive got the wrong end of the stick , or predict_all is in fact just predict (it does say "all jobs" !), in which case whats going on!
My case is still open with symantec...
Tim
