Backup issues with Cisco SMB switches
Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2026 6:22 pm
I am the IT manager for a small company with 3 sites, and am a gray-haired old network engineer. A few months ago, we setup Unimus at the smallest site, which I work out of. That Unimus instance communicates with the network infrastructure devices at the other two sites via Tailscale.
I saw occasional/intermittent backup failures, not enough to be a big concern. That local installation was primarily a trial run of Unimus, which I really like, and intend to continue to use, so I built a Unimus instance at the largest site. Surprisingly, the number of sporadic failures increased noticeably. The schedule ran once per day. In order to get a better look at these intermittent failures, I changed the default schedule to perform hourly backups.
Within a short time, a pattern became obvious... only my Cisco SMB switches were randomly failing to be backed up. I also have several Cisco Catalyst 9000-series enterprise switches, two ZyXEL switches, and four OPNsense firewalls in the mix, and I do not see recurring failures of backups of those devices. The Cisco SMB switches are Cat1200-series and CBS350 series switches of various models. IOS on some of the Cisco SMB switches is the latest, some are 1-2 years behind. I don't see any difference though in the incidences of backup failures. Also, the locations of the affected switches does not seem to matter - I am seeing failures with the SMB switches at all three sites. I also have no known ongoing issues with inter-site network communications.
With humble apologies, my team is short by two persons at the moment and I have very limited time to delve deep into this with an analysis of debug logs and Cisco switch logs. So I ask... are there any known issues with the Cisco SMB switch family device driver in Unimus 2.9.1
I saw occasional/intermittent backup failures, not enough to be a big concern. That local installation was primarily a trial run of Unimus, which I really like, and intend to continue to use, so I built a Unimus instance at the largest site. Surprisingly, the number of sporadic failures increased noticeably. The schedule ran once per day. In order to get a better look at these intermittent failures, I changed the default schedule to perform hourly backups.
Within a short time, a pattern became obvious... only my Cisco SMB switches were randomly failing to be backed up. I also have several Cisco Catalyst 9000-series enterprise switches, two ZyXEL switches, and four OPNsense firewalls in the mix, and I do not see recurring failures of backups of those devices. The Cisco SMB switches are Cat1200-series and CBS350 series switches of various models. IOS on some of the Cisco SMB switches is the latest, some are 1-2 years behind. I don't see any difference though in the incidences of backup failures. Also, the locations of the affected switches does not seem to matter - I am seeing failures with the SMB switches at all three sites. I also have no known ongoing issues with inter-site network communications.
With humble apologies, my team is short by two persons at the moment and I have very limited time to delve deep into this with an analysis of debug logs and Cisco switch logs. So I ask... are there any known issues with the Cisco SMB switch family device driver in Unimus 2.9.1