One of the many ways that an internal database backup can fail

If you have a Windows-based cell manager for your Data Protector backups, and you change the password for the account that it runs as, the from then on your IDB (internal database) backups will suddenly start to fail.

It will look like this in the session report:

[Normal] From: BSM@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "IDB"  Time: 9/05/2014 9:45:59 AM

Backup session 2014/05/09-256 started.

[Normal] From: BSM@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "IDB"  Time: 9/05/2014 9:45:59 AM

OB2BAR application on "masmgmt1.mla.com.au" successfully started.

[Normal] From: OB2BAR_POSTGRES_BAR@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "DPIDB"  Time: 9/05/2014 9:45:59 AM

Checking the Internal Database consistency

[Normal] From: OB2BAR_POSTGRES_BAR@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "DPIDB"  Time: 9/05/2014 9:46:01 AM

Check of the Internal Database consistency succeeded

[Normal] From: OB2BAR_POSTGRES_BAR@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "DPIDB"  Time: 9/05/2014 9:46:01 AM

Putting the Internal database into the backup mode finished

[Critical] From: OB2BAR_POSTGRES_BAR@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "DPIDB"  Time: 9/05/2014 9:46:01 AM

Putting the Internal Database into the backup mode failed

[Normal] From: BSM@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "IDB"  Time: 9/05/2014 9:46:38 AM

OB2BAR application on "cellmgr.ifost.org.au" disconnected.

[Critical] From: BSM@cellmgr.ifost.org.au "IDB"  Time: 9/05/2014 9:46:38 AM

None of the Disk Agents completed successfully.

Session has failed.

If you turn on debugging (by putting "OB2DBG=1-500 idb-backup.txt" into the omnirc file) you'll see copious messages in the debug log. Digging through them you'll see the following:

[ 10] Inet configurations for user 'DP_SVC@IFOST' does exist.
[ 55] Data from registry for user DP_SVC@IFOST successfully read.
[ 10] Data prepared.
[ 10] User logon failed with [1326] The user name or password is incorrect. 

[...]

psql: FATAL:  SSPI authentication failed for user "hpdp"

The reason is of course that the backup is initiated by the Inet process (which runs as Local System) and it is trying to switch user to DP_SVC because that's the account everything else runs as. It requires credentials to do this, and it won't have the right credentials.

(Solution: Start the DP GUI, and choose "Clients". Right click on the cell manager, delete the existing impersonation and add a new one. Note that you might have installed DP with another account name instead of what I've done here. You can tell by looking at what user the other DP services run as.)

Greg Baker is an independent consultant working on HP DataProtector, LiveVault and many other technologies. His the author of the only published book on HP Data Protector (http://x.ifost.org.au/dp-book) See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector.