Firewall

I’m in the process of upgrading a Backup Exec installation to the latest version and adding Oracle backups using the Backup Exec Agent For Applications And Databases. The backup server and database server are both running Windows Server 2008. This was going reasonably smoothly (well, Symantec smoothly which is bumpier than most) until I ran into an issue with the Oracle backups that took a little while to solve. It turns out that if there’s a firewall between your backup server and database server, you’ll probably need to make some changes and these aren’t very well documented. When I ran an Oracle backup, I would get the following error: Final error: 0xe000846b – The resource could not be backed up because an error occurred while connecting to the Agent for Windows. The correct version of the Agent for Windows must be running on the target computer. This didn’t affect normal filesystem backups to the database server. Also, the Backup Exec job log helpfully includes the RMAN output from the Oracle end and this showed that the backup had started (so the initial connection to the agent had obviously worked) but then an error had occurred, presumably when RMAN tried to start streaming the data to the backup server. After several dead end searches, I eventually found Symantec Technote 209163 which explains that one possible cause is the Windows Firewall and that the solution was to disable the firewall on both servers. I did that to find out if this was […]