Most of our clients use QNAP devices with Backup Exec – they’re amazing devices, and we love to use them. We ran into an interesting issue in the last few days, though (right after the switch from Daylight Savings Time)… we found that some of our client’s backups were failing in Backup Exec, and that the QNAP would show as being offline. And surprisingly, after flicking the switch in Backup Exec to bring it online again, it would immediately go right back to being offline.
Another clue to the strangeness of this problem is that if you tried to connect to it by UNC patch it would give an error about the server being misconfigured – all in all, it was acting bizarre.
Well, turns out the problem was a timing one – if you log onto the QNAP and select General Settings:
And then Date and Time:
You might find (as we did) that your beloved QNAP did not make the time change with your servers, or maybe that it has just fallen out of touch by more than a few minutes – which can be enough to make things fall over.
As this screenshot shows – make sure your time settings are accurate, and then make sure to set the time to synchronize automatically – either to an internet time server, or to your local Domain Controller (like what we have here). We found the time interval was set to 7 days, but a good idea would be to bump that up to a happy medium like once per day – that way your QNAP doesn’t wait a week to bring itself back on track again, and your backups don’t fail on you.
Once you get your time sorted out, you should be able to bring it online again in Backup Exec and start pushing backups out to it again.
Hope this helps… Good luck and have fun!
Master & CmdR 