Backups to SmartDisk show errors such as the following in the job logs:
Warning 2012/03/26 06:55:23 2801 Data Plugin Hostname Transfer to the device has stalled
Warning 2012/03/26 07:02:28 2801 Data Plugin Hostname Transfer to the device is no longer stalled
Error 2012/03/26 07:00:16 0 Media NetVault-Server Marking device 'SmartDisk - {NVSD_Server_Name}' offline - no contact for XXX seconds
For more information on this topic, please see the Administration Module 1 Introduction to NetVault Backup-Web-based Training
The following 3 configuration changes should help minimize the number of times that SmartDisk shows as Stalled or is marked as Offline:
1.) Remove SmartDisk from NVBU Device Management, then re-add it by its IP address, not by its name. This will help bypass any communication delays that might be caused by DNS-related resolution issues.
2.) To increase SmartDisk's maximum transfer rate from the default 100 MBPs to 200 MBps, open a command prompt window and cd to “..\NetVault SmartDisk\foundation\bin", then run the following command:
smartdisk.bat config --network-capacity 200
3.) By default, the block transfer size for SmartDisk is 32 KB, but increasing this packet size on certain networks can help NVSD steam data more efficiently, resulting in reducing the number of times the device need to stall and stopping the message channel from dropping.
To increase the block transfer size to 256 KB, open a command prompt window and cd to “..\NetVault SmartDisk\foundation\bin", then run the following command:
smartdisk.bat config --update --webdav 37453 --block-size 262144
Once these changes have been made, stop and start the SmartDisk service, then stop and start the NetVault Backup service, just to fully refresh all of the changes that were made through to both servers.
