Are you having trouble receiving reports to your CMC account? It could be due to your ISP

Hi Everyone,

A customer of ours with a large number of  BackupAssist installs were having issues with their CMC reports appearing irregularly. A machine may report to the CMC portal 3 days in a row, then not at all for 7 days, etc.

A few remote sessions on certain machines and performing some tests whilst monitoring network activity revealed that it was an issue with the network setup. Our developers had made a few improvements within BackupAssist to counter these issues and improve the situation; we were never able to fully overcome it. After performing some additional testing, it was discovered that when performing a trace route to www.backupassist.com/cmc from one of the problematic machines, that it was hitting the ISP’s routers (outside of both his and our configuration control) and not getting any further.

What had been happening was that the customer’s network had quite a number of machines; but only one connection to their ISP – so as far as the Internet was concerned all of the machines had same IP address. All backups that were scheduled to finish within a certain amount of time would then submit their reports to the BackupAssist CMC server.

The ISP was able to investigate and make the necessary changes on their end at the customer’s request and now all systems are able to contact the BackupAssist CMC server without any interruption. The customers CMC service is now fully reliable and always up to date.

The CMC requests from BackupAssist which are sent through as generic https (port 443) and http (port 80) requests. If you find you’re having similar issues; it could be worth discussing this with your ISP as well.

For more information about using or licencing the BackupAssist CMC please click here.

If you have any further questions or comments; please feel free to contact us via e-mail at support@backupassist.com.

Kind Regards;

Stuart
BackupAssist Support Team