Hi guys,
Hope there is someone who has got some advise, cause I am sort of at the end of my ropes. Let me explain my problem.....
We always do Backups everyday. Full backup over the weekend and then Incremental backups over weekdays. These are backups which get taken off site before we start a new Full backup. We also have RAID in our server which mirrors all of the drives. Sometime last year, around September I started getting error with the Full Backups. Our Full Backups runs for about 48 hours in total, so after about 9 hours, it would stop due to an error. The Backup program would say that the "Path was not found". So I began I thought the first time that there might have been a problem with the UPS or something. So we got an electrician to service the UPS and replace the batteries. Next full backup..... same story again, but this time it was like 5 hours after the backup was started. So I though it might be the network cards on the server. So I replaced every single network card on the server with new ones which I bought. Great..... Next full backup, same story again but this time the backup stopped around 12 hours after it was started with the same message again. So I thought it was the PC the backup system was on. So replaced the PC with a new one. Full Backup started again the weekend afterwards, but same story again with a different time of failure.
Then that weekend if failed Saturday morning while a few guys where working in the office. So one of our directors came to me and said that everything was off for about 3 min. Internet, Printer, Scanner like in everything. You couldn't even connect to another PC through the network. So I immediately thought it might be one of our 3 switches that was giving this problem. So I replaced all of the switches with loan switches from a supplier to test this theory. So waited till the next weekend to see if the problem had been solved. Nothing had changed..... Same problem happened again.
I don't know what to test anymore or what to do. I already had some Networking guru's here as well and even they can't seem to explain this weird happening. So maybe one of you guys have got a few things I could try. I was thinking of getting some or other software that can monitor the server and see when the connection goes down, and if it even goes down while we are in the office in the week. I just don't know which software can do constant monitoring.
Any Ideas on software or other thing I could try? Oh before I forget... Server is a Linux server, running ClearOS 5.2.