A major part of the Server Management Service that we offer at Bobcares is to perform upgrades on the Servers periodically. A common error that we notice after a kernel update is “R1Soft backup agent failed to start”.

Failure of the backup agent disturbs the backup task of the server. Hence it affects the restoration of files from the backup server.

Let us today discuss the step to make the agent active again.

What causes R1Soft backup agent failed to start?

Normally after a kernel update, it boots the Operating System into a new kernel. The CDP Agent kernel driver for the prior Kernel may not be able to work with the new kernel.

Similarly, when the CDP agent kernel driver is not installed on the server, it can also trigger a similar error.

Let us now discuss the steps to fix the R1Soft backup agent failed to start error after a kernel update.

How to fix R1Soft backup agent failed to start?

The first step to fix the status of the R1Soft backup agent is to check if the module is loaded properly with the lsmod command.

# lsmod | grep -i hcp

There won’t be any output for the above command. Thus, it confirms that we need to load the module. We then use the command below to resolve the driver issue:

# r1soft-setup-old --get-module

Now if we check the status of the driver with the previous command, it returns an output similar to :

lsmod|grep -i hcp
hcpdriver 85110 4

This result thus confirms that the hcp driver module is loaded properly. Finally, we can move on to the step to start the agent.

# /etc/init.d/cdp-agent start

Now if we check the status of the R1Soft backup agent, we will receive an output that it is active and running in the server.

# /etc/init.d/cdp-agent status
● sbm-agent.service - R1Soft CDP Agent service
Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/sbm-agent.service; enabled; vendor preset: disabled)
Active: active (running)

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Conclusion

In short, when the CDP agent kernel driver is not able to load the backup agent, it triggers R1Soft backup agent failed error. Today, we discussed how our Support Engineers load the driver module and bring the service back to active status.