Environment

Windows Server 2003 R2 on a Dell PowerEdge 1900. Services for Macintosh is installed to support the one Mac user in the office. Veritas Backup Exec for Windows Servers version 9.

Issue

Thousands of instances of BackupExecAgentBrowser Event ID 57414 errors in the Application Event Log, one every two minutes. The message reads “The Agent Browser experienced an error retrieving the list of Macintosh Backup Agents in the AppleTalk Zone '[OURZONE]'. This problem can prevent the Agent Browser from finding Macintosh Backup Agents for this Zone.”

The Symantec Knowledge Base does have an article number 252100 on the issue. Unfortunately the article offers no suggestions beyond restarting services, rebooting the system, and applying updates. Since this machine has been rebooted from time to time, I doubted that stopping and starting the services that would help, although now that I look at it, I'm not so sure it was rebooted since these error messages started. (Due to the frequency of this message, the event log only goes back about two weeks.)

Resolution

I used my blog entry from last June on Configuring Services for Macintosh under Windows Server 2003 to review how to fiddle with Services for Macintosh. I went in to Routing and Remote Access, opened the properties for the adapter, and clicked on the Update List button. Then I clicked on Apply (which took a couple minutes), and finally on OK.

For good measure, I then restarted the Backup Exec Agent Browser service. 

After this, I got an informational message for each printer in the Application Event Log:  MacPrint raised Event ID 2010, “The printer [printer name] is now available to the AppleTalk network.” But no more BackupExec error messages!

Update 8/14/2009:  Got this same error again after setting up a VPN in Routing and Remote Access. Google led me back to my own blog entry (doh!). In the server properties, I had unchecked “Allow AppleTalk-based remote clients to connect to this server,” thinking I was disabling VPN access from AppleTalk clients. I also unchecked “Enable this computer as a Router” since I didn't particularly want to route VPN connections. Now I realize that these steps probably disabled all AppleTalk access. Oops! I'm reversing those two changes re-applying the AppleTalk Routing adapter properties as described above, and re-starting the Backup Exec Agent Browser service. No more 57414 messages!