Error: "Could not retrieve backup settings for primary" in Log shipping Backup job

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This one is simple but interesting...

Log shipping which was running for an year, suddenly stopped working. Log shipping monitor says that there are no backups restored for last 14849 minutes... Why?

We started figuring this out, the copy and restore jobs were running fine but only the backup job was failing.

What was the error generated by the Log shipping backup job?

*** Error: Could not retrieve backup settings for primary ID 'abfb9a42-207e-451b-968c-3ac29edc16f9'.(Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.LogShipping) ***
*** Error: Failed to connect to server SQLSERVER2001.(Microsoft.SqlServer.ConnectionInfo) ***
*** Error: A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server)(.Net SqlClient Data Provider) ***
----- END OF TRANSACTION LOG BACKUP -----

But the name of the SQL Server name is SQLSERVER2012, so why is it looking for SQLSERVER2001? This is because the server was renamed from SQLSERVER2001 to SQLSERVER2012 recently but the sys.servers was not updated with this change.

As a result, SELECT @@SERVERNAME still points to old name so we ran commands given below to update sys.server entry and then RESTARTED SQL Server:

EXEC sp_dropserver 'Your_OLD_Computer_Name'

GO

EXEC sp_addserver 'Your_NEW_Computer_Name', 'local'

GO

Now we reconfigured log shipping to make it work. You can either do this or update the Log shipping backup with correct SQL Server instance name or create a SQL Server alias pointing back to new server name to make it work. Still not working? Leave the error message in the comments here....

Reference:

Rename a Computer that Hosts a Stand-Alone Instance of SQL Server - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143799.aspx

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2012
    In this case we mostally re asign the logshipping.

  • Anonymous
    February 17, 2014
    Hello Chidambaram , My Monitor server Log shipping table are not updated . Could you please let me know why these tables are not updated with backup/restore/alerts information . details : Primary server -running under local account Primary server agent - running under the domain account Secondary server -running under local account secondary server agent - running under same the primary domain account Mirror server -running under local account Mirror server agent - running under the different domain account Could you please explain about the what kind of security we need to provide the agent accounts .

  • Anonymous
    July 10, 2014
    This works. Thanks for a Wonderful article.

  • Anonymous
    September 08, 2014
    This worked... Thanks a lot!

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2014
    I just changed the name in the OS cmnd on the Job in the Agent... seems to be working fine.

  • Anonymous
    October 22, 2014
    Thanks for sharing this. It really helped me.

  • Anonymous
    October 29, 2014
    Brilliant, this helped me allot, thank you Sakthivel Chidambaram

  • Anonymous
    September 10, 2015
    That is a great. It helped me a lot. I could no get log shipping running in the fist place. Thank a lot!

  • Anonymous
    October 14, 2015
    your blog post here was super-useful, thank you. in this sentence, did you mean to say "update the log shipping backup JOB" ? You can either do this or update the Log shipping backup with correct SQL Server instance name Reply from Sakthi: Yes, I mean log shipping backup job

  • Anonymous
    January 30, 2016
    Hi, I'm having this issue randomly, I'm backing up the TL every 20 minutes and some times I get the error 5-8 times a day.. can somebody help?? thanks