Mastering: System Center Data Protection Manager 2007

Chapter 12. Advanced DPM

New capabilities emerge just by virtue of having smart people with access to state-of-the-art technology.

—Robert E. Kahn

Troubleshooting systems and software when they're not working correctly is a large part of our duties as systems administrators. We can't remember how many times we've been stuck in front of a machine that has been misbehaving, at the end of our creative ropes, having just watched the last idea we could think of fail to solve the problem. We're willing to bet that most of you have been in that situation too. (If you haven't been there yet, you will be if you stay in the field long enough.) In these situations, there's a natural tendency to silently retry a procedure that didn't work the last time while we say to ourselves, the servers, and whatever spirits or entities may be listening, "Please, just work this time!" While the exact words you use may be some other derivative, the intent is the same; this is the IT equivalent of throwing a Hail-Mary pass during that last "fourth down and hopeless" to somehow, against all odds, get the touchdown and win the game.

We have a somewhat uncomfortable insight to share about these situations: they often arise when we've been trying to make some technology fit into our networks in ways that most people (including the original designers) wouldn't think to use it. The truth is that every network environment we've ever seen has featured at least one major quirk, some oddity of deployment that exists (and ...