Yesterday I got a follow up call from the Brightstor tech - at 4:30pm. Did I mention I usually get off work at 4:30pm? But I stayed, dedicated worker bee that I am, and listened to him accuse the hardware, operating system, and our other applications, then our network and other servers for the noted and spectacular failure of Brightstor to backup our Windows 2000 server across the network via the W2K client. *sigh*

I may put in an email to the sales-drone in charge of our account, requesting that our case be escalated to a higher-level tech, as this one is up against the wall of his knowledge. I have noticed that once a tech from any firm reaches the limit of their skill, they resort to the old 'not our software' gambit, in the hope that I will sigh, shed a tear, and simply accept that it was not meant to be.

Now then - the hardware is identical to the previously-working configuration. The only thing that changed was that we installed W2K server on the unit instead of the previous Win NT 4.0 sp6a. We applied sp2 for w2k server to the unit - no change, other than it broke PcAnywhere (ALERT! SP2 for W2K will break PcAnywhere - be warned!). The strange thing is that sometimes it works. Not predictably or reliably, but occasionally out of the blue, the backup succeeds. If there were a fault in the hardware/OS, wouldn't that impossible? Time to escalate the issue.