So let me start off by saying that if I had a support agreement this wouldn’t be an issue, however against my strong recommendations, the powers that be have decided to put off renewing the support agreement.
Our Unitrends backup system had been working perfect for months. We come in one day and our Internet connection is dead. We could not communicate within our LAN… Assuming it was the SonicWall we temporarily swapped it out with a managed switch. No change. We eventually tracked it down the Unitrends appliance. Uplugging the network restored all previously lost connections. Plugging it back in, kills the network again within a matter of minutes (no immediately, which we found odd…)
Anyone have experience with this type of thing, or seen this with a Unitrends appliance before. From what I can see. It seems to be an extremly rare thing.
8 Spice ups
I would put wireshark on a system and sniff the traffic it’s generating. It’s not normal for these appliances to do this unless you have a NIC that’s going bad I would guess.
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Gene - First, thanks for using Unitrends. Secondly, my apologies that you’re having this issue. Did you know that anyone can chat with our support team directly on our website for free? If not, I would encourage you to head over to www.unitrends.com , and choose the support chat from the floating menu on the right side of the screen.
This sounds like a pretty serious issue, so you’re best bet will be to get in touch with our support team ASAP.
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Did you verify that there are no conflicting IP addresses?
Have you tried:
- Different port on the network switch
- Different Ethernet cable
- Different Ethernet port on the Unitrends appliance
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Bill Kindle - Unfortunately I have a very limited amount of time for diagnosis, but i will see if I can get a packet capture of the network and see what’s going.
Katie - I did call Unitrends support first. I was told that without a support agreement they could not help me. The best they could do at the time was put me in touch with the renewals department.
Jon - I did verify that there were no conflicting ip address. At least none that showed up from a network sweep, ping, or any other test I could come up with. I did swap out the Ethernet cable, and switch. I assumed since I changed out the switch that swapping the port was kind of redundant. We currently use both ports on the appliance, but I was able to change the setting of eth1 to match eth0 (using a different, but available) IP address. I tried running it with each port plugged in separately and both together, no difference.
Gene- You will be charged for a call with an engineer, however, you will not be charged for chatting with our engineers via our website. Have you tried that?
How is the Unitrends appliance connected to the switch?
- Directly (appliance - cable - switch)
- Indirectly (via wall jack, punch down block, etc…)
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Nothing that Unitrends does should bring down your network. This sounds like a SonicWall problem. No matter how much Unitrends pounds on it, it should not fail.
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It’s possible that the NIC on the UT has died and is spewing data out. That can happen.
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Could be an IP address conflict.
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Have you looked at the diagnostics in the SonicWall? Do you have error counters (system wide and per port)?
Note: I have never used a SonicWall, so I don’t know what’s available
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Sorry for the big delay, been somewhat hectic around here. So the issue is somewhat resolved, and I’m getting closer. Here is what I’ve done. We took the appliance off of the main network and set it up in an isolated test network. I was able to log into long enough before it killed everything to disable all of the backup jobs. After i rebooted the machine it seemed to stop killing everything. I put it back on our main network and it was still good. Since then i’ve been re-enabling the back jobs slowly to see if it’s possible that one of the jobs was causing the issue. (I know it seems unlikely that a backup job caused this, but that was everything seems to point to at the moment.)
As of right now, it running successfully on the network, but all of the backup jobs are not running yet. I will update this thread if i either getting everything successfully up and running or I find the cause of the original failure.
Gene - Thanks for the updates. If you continue to have issues once you’ve turned all of the jobs back on, please let me know.
Ok, So it appears to me that something within the Unitrends software is corrupt. I have two hosts that have deleted their own IP address, as well as changed their host type (ie- from windows to linux or windows to ‘Other OS’) the IP address for both of these hosts has reset to 0.0.0.0. The hosts operating system type cannot be changed, and the IP cannot be corrected. Also the hosts cannot be deleted. These two corrrupted hosts seem to be what has been causing the issue. When the backup jobs for these two were enabled it would basically killed the system. I was finally able to convince the powers that be that we needed to restore our Service agreement. The support team from Unitrends is working on it, but as of yet, no resolution.
Gene - I’m sorry to hear that you’re still having these issues, but glad that you have renewed your support contract, and that they’re working on this for you. Is there anything I can do to help you right now?
Unitrends support was able to remove the corrupt hosts that were on my system. Unfortunately there is no root cause of the corruption, but everything is back up and working as it should be.
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Gene - I’m so glad that this was resolved. I’m sure that our team is investigating what may have caused this from our end, and if they find anything, will include that in a future update.
