Updating software should not make me whimper…

Last month, I started deploying the notebook clients for my CommVault backup system. It worked really well for the first three clients. Then, it started having a problem. The client would install, by the updates would not be applied. I’ve since deployed those first few notebooks and backups have been successful. Another problem appeared at about the same time. I was no longer able to download updates.

Could these problems be related? Probably. I suspected I broke the downloading of new updates when I tried to fix the updating of the notebooks. Either that, or it happened when I attempted to implement a secondary software cache of the updates to the remote offices to reduce network traffic.

The worst part of all of this was that the log files would show nothing useful. The DownloadSoftware.log file would simply stop updating with the following as the last two lines. The update job itself would never fail or provide and error.

RecurseDownloadPackages() – Beginning timestamp pass
CaptureMasterTimestampFile() – Capturing master timestamp file …/AllTimeStamps_##########.exe

I searched all over CommVault’s documentation, knowledge base, and forums. I could have submitted a ticket to get help but I’m just too stubborn when it comes to things that I might have caused.

Even after deleting the CVPackages and CVUpdates out of the SoftwareCache and using the ‘CopyToCache’ utility to recreate the CVPackages from the physical media did not help. Today, I decided I would go ahead and download the latest version of the media, Nov 2011, and copy that version to see if it made a difference.

While waiting for the download, I continued to poke around. I decided to try to execute that executable file, AllTimeStamps_##########.exe, to see what it does. Guess what? When I tried to run it, I got an error.

What the?!? “Can’t create output file”? I’m in the Administrators group! I then try to run it as Administrator. Executes without error and creates the text file.

After a quick Google search, I find that this is caused by User Account Control (UAC) and I find how to disable UAC. One quick reboot later and updates are downloading again. Now, once the updates are done, I’ll check to see if the notebook clients will receive updates.

-Justin