Shadow folders - reliability issues

cts · Post by **cts** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 10:31 am

Hi

It is very important for our organisation to be able to use shadow folders facility in Vault. We need Vault to deploy files to another machine on the network and we use UNC path for that. So we have followed instructions in this document:
http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=188

And shadow folders WORK. However they only work for short period of time and then stop. No error messages are displayed to the user, however file “vaultshadowfolderservice.txt” shows large number of errors like this:

04/06/2007 12:49:46 <generic>: [<No Name>:4084] Vault's Shadow Folders encountered an exception attempting to get the files for OLR. The Shadow Folders for the repository may not be syncrhonized with the Vault Server.Could not find a part of the path "\\192.168.6.54\olr".

The path for the shadow folders is “\\192.168.6.54\olr\LiveApplication\Shows”, therefore the error message above only displays part of the UNC path

Some information that might help to resolve an issue:
- Vault server is running on Windows Server 2003 SP1
- Vault server software version is: 3.5.0 (4741)
- Clients we use are: 3.5.1 (4786)
- Several Vault folders use same physical folder as shadow folder
- Vault server and machine that has shadow folder both belong to the same Windows domain
- The only way to solve the problem is to delete shadow folder mapping (from Vault admin>Repository Options) and map it again. Then it works again for short while

Please help
Thank you

By the way – the password reset functionality on your forum does not work – it does not send email. I had to create new dummy account to be able to post

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 12:05 pm

Our first suggestion would be to upgrade Vault Server (and clients) to 3.5.2. We have fixed a number of shadow folder issues since Vault 3.5.

If this does not resolve the problem, it's still best to troubleshoot with the latest version.

cts · Post by **cts** » Mon Jun 04, 2007 2:11 pm

Thank you Linda

Have upgraded and will use it tomorrow to see if it made any difference

cts · Post by **cts** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 2:38 am

Have upgraded servers and clients to version 3.5.2

This seems a bit more reliable, although i already had one instance of shadow folders not working this morning. I had to open shadow folder mapping window (in admin), select mapping, click "Edit" and click "Ok" without changing anything. This fixed it for now

I had a look at “vaultshadowfolderservice.txt”. I have diferent messages there now. Most common one is:

05/06/2007 08:21:21 <generic>: [<No Name>:2164] Vault's Shadow Folders attempting get (by Delta) for 2007

("2007" is the name of the Vault folder i am creating shadow for)

Amother common error (although reported not as often as the one above) is:

05/06/2007 08:21:23 <generic>: [<No Name>:2164] Vault Shadow Folder encountered a problem: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

And i have one instance of this error:

05/06/2007 08:21:22 <generic>: [<No Name>:2164] Vault Shadow Folder encountered a problem: Exception of type VaultClientOperationsLib.GetLatestVersionFailedException was thrown.

Thank you

cts · Post by **cts** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 2:21 pm

Hello

Shadow folders started to work well - thank you very much for help.

However now there is a need to deploy files to another folder on another machine on the network. And while files are deployed just fine to the original server, nothing is being pushed to second server.

Our vault shadow folder log file gives us this error:

++++++++++
Folders for the repository may not be syncrhonized with the Vault Server.The working folder state information for \\192.9.150.32\OLR_ShowFiles\acpo07em\Images is incompatible with this version of Vault. Please choose a different working folder path. The specific compatibility exception was: Timeout opening state file C:\Program Files\SourceGear\Vault Shadow Folder Cache\380C02CA-29FB-4EA7-88FE-43727C5204EA\admin\_sgvault\-1836222913\state for read. :::: Time elapsed from Get() start to exception was -0.12031481
++++++++++

"\\192.9.150.32\OLR_ShowFiles" is the path where we want folders to be

I would appreciate the help

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Thu Jul 12, 2007 2:35 pm

Timeout opening state file

Looks like there's some sort of timeout when the shadow folder service is accessing the cache/baseline files.

What is the connection between the Vault Server machine and the shadow folder machine? Are they on a LAN or WAN?

cts · Post by **cts** » Fri Jul 13, 2007 2:12 am

Thank you Linda

Access to folder is LAN. The ping time between servers is always <1ms.

A bit more information that might help you:

-The same Vault folder is being "shadowed" into two physical locations. Files are deployed into one location, but the other location fails.

-The location that is failing is Windows 2003 server. But it is not a physical server - it is a virtual machine running in the VMWare world. Have you had any issues with VMWare?

-when i delete and re-create shadow folder association, it creates all the folders, but there are no files in those folders

-Synchronisation options are set to "Optimised for speed"

Thank you

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Mon Jul 16, 2007 12:52 pm

The first thing I would suggest is upgrading the Vault Server to 3.5.2. This is a free upgrade if you already have 3.5.

We made some changes to Shadow Folders in this 3.5.2 version. This may or may not resolve the problem, but at least we'll have the various fixes in place if we need to troubleshoot further.

cts · Post by **cts** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 2:32 am

Linda

Our server is 3.5.2 already. There is no need to upgrade it

Thanks

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 11:28 am

Sorry about that . . .

As mentioned earlier, there seems to be a problem with the cache being out of sync.

Try creating a new folder on the network machine and create a shadow folder association using that folder.

Does that populate properly?

cts · Post by **cts** » Wed Jul 18, 2007 3:43 pm

Creating new physical folder did not solve the problem. When I have added new shadow association between perository and new physical folder, Vault created file structure in the physical folder and populated it with files. But updates are not being saved there aftewards

One more piece of information that could be useful: when i create shadow folder that is "synchronised" (instead of being "optimised for speed"), i get these errors in log file:

Code: Select all

18/07/2007 22:31:57 <generic>: [<No Name>:4020] GetEntryAssembly() returned null; not logging assembly name
18/07/2007 22:31:58 <generic>: [<No Name>:260] Vault's Shadow Folders encountered an exception attempting to get the files for OLR.  The Shadow Folders for the repository may not be syncrhonized with the Vault Server.Thread was being aborted. :::: Time elapsed from Get() start to exception was -0.859651921666667

Also get these:

Code: Select all

18/07/2007 22:31:58 <generic>: [<No Name>:260] Vault Shadow Folder encountered a problem: Thread was being aborted.

And few of these:

Code: Select all

18/07/2007 22:32:42 <generic>: [<No Name>:1328] Vault Shadow Folder encountered a problem: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

And finally getting many of these:

Code: Select all

18/07/2007 22:39:35 <generic>: [<No Name>:1328] Error: Local file update for $/2007/TEMP07/temp.asp failed: System.ArgumentException: Invalid File or Directory attributes value.
   at System.IO.File.SetAttributes(String path, FileAttributes fileAttributes)
   at VaultClientOperationsLib.WorkingFolder.UpdateWorkingFile(VaultClientFile file, Int64 targetVersion, Int64 displayVersion, MergeType merge, VaultDateTime dt, Boolean makeBackups, OverwritePrompt PromptData)
   at VaultClientOperationsLib.UpdateThread.ProcessCommand(UpdateThreadCommand command, UpdateThreadCommandResult& outputResult)
18/07/2007 22:39:35 <generic>: [<No Name>:1328] Vault's Shadow Folders encountered an exception attempting to get the files for OLR.  The Shadow Folders for the repository may not be syncrhonized with the Vault Server.Exception of type VaultClientOperationsLib.GetLatestVersionFailedException was thrown. :::: Time elapsed from Get() start to exception was -1.20002304

Thank you

lbauer · Post by **lbauer** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 9:42 pm

To troubleshoot this further, we'd like to try to reproduce this with a copy of your database. Email support at sourcegear.com, ATTN: Linda and we'll work out the details.