Something broke.. and relocating.

realm · 2019-01-08T17:07:40.000Z

Good morning,

When logging in to the dashboard today, it took an abnormally long period of time before displaying in the browser compared to usual. It normally takes 3-5 seconds, today it took more like 2 minutes before the page got displayed.

I am planning phase of relocating Spiceworks to a different server, and can’t remember where my daily backup is stored, so I figured I would just go under Settings / General settings. In doing so (or going to any other other menu options actually), I get the “Loading…” with the spinning wheel for a few minutes, and then it eventually times out with a message that something went wrong, and I should restart spiceworks. I did that, and also restarted the server itself, to see if it would help, but it did not.

Is there a different way to find out where the Data backups would be located? From what I understand, I would just need to unzip those to the new installation data/Db folders?

thank you,

seanalvis · 2019-01-08T17:15:42.000Z

Mine backsup to C:/Program Files (x86)/Spiceworks/backup

realm · 2019-01-08T17:43:38.000Z

Thank you Sean. Sadly, that folder is empty for me, so it would have been set to a different folder.

jackie · 2019-01-08T17:50:05.000Z

There’s a setting for where Backups should go under /settings/data-backups. If you didn’t enable backups, it doesn’t happen automatically. If you’ve been backing up the file system, however, you can just recover from there.

There’s a ton of posts that you can search for on how to move or restore your system. Here’s one:

restore database to a clean install Spiceworks Support

I had a server crash. I reinstalled Spiceworks. How do I restore the database backup?

realm · 2019-01-08T18:00:05.000Z

Thanks Jackie. I did have backups enabled. Unfortunately, when I try to navigate to /settings/data-backups, (or other any url than the dashboard, it’s a no go, I get the “Loading” screen forever.

thanks for the link on moving the system, I’ll have a look at that as soon as I can track down my backup. I did find a folder with a lot of spiceworks-backup files, but they date back to last June. I’m hoping we have something more recent and that someone just changed the path where those were getting saved.

Worse case, I guess, is I start from scratch with no database, and rebuild from the ground up…

dbeato · 2019-01-08T19:15:51.000Z

RealM:

Thanks Jackie. I did have backups enabled. Unfortunately, when I try to navigate to /settings/data-backups, (or other any url than the dashboard, it’s a no go, I get the “Loading” screen forever.

thanks for the link on moving the system, I’ll have a look at that as soon as I can track down my backup. I did find a folder with a lot of spiceworks-backup files, but they date back to last June. I’m hoping we have something more recent and that someone just changed the path where those were getting saved.

Worse case, I guess, is I start from scratch with no database, and rebuild from the ground up…

You need to navigate on the Explorer level inside that server.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Spiceworks\backup

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realm · 2019-01-08T19:27:18.000Z

Yup, that’s where I looked. The folder is there, but it’s empty.

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realm · 2019-01-08T19:35:03.000Z

Jackie (Spiceworks):

There’s a setting for where Backups should go under /settings/data-backups.

All I get when trying to go to settings is this screen. At the bottom, it says “Waiting for spiceworks” (which is the DNS Name of that machine).

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realm · 2019-01-08T19:39:38.000Z

And after about 15 minutes, I eventually got this:

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dbeato · 2019-01-08T19:52:13.000Z

RealM:

Yup, that’s where I looked. The folder is there, but it’s empty.

So you don’t have backups, start spiceworks in safe mode and check and make a backup.

https://community.spiceworks.com/support/desktop/docs/safe-mode

realm · 2019-01-08T20:44:06.000Z

Something is definitely broken. dbeato I did do the safe mode, and restarted (thanks for the link). When it restarts, it takes me to the dashboard. From there, I tried to go to Settings/General settings, it gets to the loading page, and becomes non-responsive. Even closing my browser and trying to reload spiceworks gets me nowhere. I can restart (from the tray icon) and get the “Spiceworks is heating up”, and after about 10 minutes, I get the login screen then end up back on the dashboard. It seems that I can get to any other screens/menus. But as soon as I try to go to settings, I’m back to non-responding.

@dbeato

dbeato · 2019-01-08T20:45:55.000Z

You can also see in the root of the Spiceworks folder the backups the upgrades made, what version are you currently running?

jackie · 2019-01-08T20:49:05.000Z

Try going to /v1/settings and see if that takes you farther. If you know how to open the JavaScript console, you may also see an error in there that could be a hint as to what’s going on. Or your production.log may have an exception…

realm · 2019-01-08T20:52:33.000Z

7.5.00107.

So I did a new installation, and picked up the most recent (June) backup I had. It works just fine. I shut everything down, and copied the data and db folders from the broken installation, and I cannot make it to the settings page. I have a theory here. We used to have a file server VM (let’s call it server) which got migrated to a new physical server (called EDM-FS1). The “server” stayed online up until last weekend where it was finally taken offline. I am thinking that at some point, we might have had the spiceworks backup going to that server. If the server is no longer online, is it possible that spiceworks is locking up because it cannot find that path anymore? And if that is the case, is there something I can manually fix, like a config setting, so that spiceworks stops looking at that location? That’s the only thing I can thing that has changed in our setup over the last few weeks…

jackie · 2019-01-08T20:54:31.000Z

So, if upon restore, you have the same issues, you have something with the database getting in the way. You either have to go back to an older backup, or figure out the problem. Try a couple of my suggestions from my last post to see if it can help. I do not believe the path should be the cause, but the v1 url may get you back into settings to confirm that by changing it.

realm · 2019-01-08T21:14:55.000Z

FIXED!!

So I was correct, but had no idea how to figure that out, until you (Jackie) pointed me to the right log file. In there, I found a few “Status: 500 Internal Server Error” but then I searched for “Backup” and found this:

E[14:24:01.83 bfe35c] Backup path //server/IT-Share/Real/spiceworksbackup could not be written to
E[14:24:01.83 bfe35c] No such file or directory @ dir_s_mkdir - //server/IT-Share
I[14:24:01.84 bfe35c] finished initializing scheduler

So this told me where the backup used to be. I created a small VM with that name, recreated the folder structure, restarted spiceworks, and it was much faster to load, and I could also get into the settings. So I fixed the path to one that has replaced that deceased server, and it’s all good now.

jackie · 2019-01-08T21:58:43.000Z

Thanks for posting your findings too - because it’s good for the next person to know that an not-found backup path basically kills Spiceworks. That sucks too.

realm · 2019-01-08T22:01:04.000Z

Yup. It does suck. A simple popup message would have saved me 4 hours of messing around with that. But we’re good now. Next time I have that problem, I can do a search and see my own post

dbeato · 2019-01-09T03:51:20.000Z

RealM:

Yup. It does suck. A simple popup message would have saved me 4 hours of messing around with that. But we’re good now. Next time I have that problem, I can do a search and see my own post

But also setup your backups to be local and then a scripts that copies it to the network share.