Backup Exec 12.5 stall Error - e0008821

So every once in a while one of my policy based disk to disk to tape backup jobs will just hang or stall forever. It's really nifty since it will go well beyond the auto-cancellation period - you know the ' stop job if it takes longer than x hours' checkbox. The first few times it happened I wound up having to restart the whole backup server to get the job to cancel since no amount of effort on the front end GUI would fix it. After reboot it would show the failed job with a generic error code of e0008821. I even tried restarting the server that the job status claimed it was working on at the time of the hang. After a few more tries it occurred to me that the job status was lying to me and that it may actually be trying to communicate with the next server on the backup list. So to the command prompt I went. The results of netstat -aon | more

show that the server is currently communicating with port 10000 on another server. The catch is that while the job status said it was working on server A, the netstat showed it was only talking to server B at the time. So I went to server B and restarted the backup Agent and my stalled job suddenly started proceeding again. Of course, this isn't a great long term fix but it's not unusual for backup agents to need a good kick start from time to time. It would be nice if it was better at auto-recovery...

http://gnawgnu.blogspot.com/2009/12/backup-exec-125-stall-e0008821.html

This happens because the BE software is not able to communicate with the TAPE Drive.

Resolution:
1  : Open Backup Exec Console and go to the Device TAB...
2  : Right Click on the SERVER NAME and Click on "PAUSED"
3  : Right Click and click on "PAUSED" again

Now try any utility jobs like inventory or erase.