I have a problem with a web service that is installed and started with a .msi that is created with the WiX toolset.
The service can be installed and started on all the machines I tested so far (shown as running in the Services Manager) but on some machines it is not reachable (for example via a browser) and not shown in the list of listening ports on that machine (displayed with 'netstat -a').
I am trying to figure out what's going wrong but I am not really familiar with web service development and configuration. It's a third party service, thus I don't know how it works internally.
A good starting point for me would be to find out, what exactly happens when a service is installed and started during the execution of the .msi-file.
Maybe I could try to tackle the problem on a lower level then.
Below is my code in the ServiceInstall-Element:
<ServiceInstall
Id="ServiceID"
Type="ownProcess"
Vital="yes"
Name="ServiceName"
DisplayName="ServiceDisplayName"
Description="Lorem Ipsum"
Start="auto"
Account="LocalSystem"
ErrorControl="normal"
Interactive="no"
Arguments="action=run">
</ServiceInstall>
The argument is important - without it, the service won't start or run.
Maybe someone else encounterd the same or a similar problem and can help me out.
Thanks already in advance - each hint is appreciated.
EDIT I (15.04.18):
As it might be a problem with the specific service, I will add some further information here:
It's a third party software called CryptoLicensing:
http://www.ssware.com/cryptolicensing/cryptolicensing_net.htm
Part of this software is that specific program, that serves as a License Server and does the license registration, for example in a customer's network.
The service can be run as a Windows application or installed and run as a Windows service. In both cases it should be listening on a (pre-)specified port on the installed machine.
Whenever I start the .exe as an application, everything works as intended. The service is reachable (for example with the browser) and can be accessed from other machines in the network.
When the .exe is installed and started as a service, it does not work as intended on every machine. For example if I install and start the service on my laptop, it is shown as running in the Services Manager, but is not reachable on its assigned URL (not even on the localhost) nor is the specific port displayed in the active listening ports, for example with 'netstat -a'.
The service itself starts without any error messages and does not log any errors or exceptions as it seems to be running without any problems.
I contacted the vendor, but sometimes he doesn't reply quickly and he is not very specific in his replies.
Before asking the question I assumed that it was a problem with the Windows user rights and the WiX installer but during the discussion here I had the feeling that it might a problem with the service itself.
I hope this 'new' piece of information helps in isolating and location the problem.
Thanks to everyone who helped so far!
Hopefully not stating the obvious here, but WiX doesn't do much except populate the ServiceInstall table in the MSI file, so this is about why Windows Installer won't start the service. ServiceInstall table:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa371637(v=vs.85).aspx
Also, this isn't really about ServiceInstall - it's probably about the ServiceControl element in your WiX source, but it's not clear whether that's how you're starting it or if you're starting it manually later on. That does make a difference. What is the error message and where are you getting it, and is it a 1920 or 1921 error (in the context of ServiceControl).
The main reason a service will start on one system but not another is missing dependencies. If your service is C++ based (the post doesn't say) then there are probably dependencies on C runtimes, UCRT runtimes, MFC or ATL runtimes and so on.
First: are you sure this service is intended to run as LocalSystem? (MSDN, SO).
Second: did you check the event logs in detail for anything obvious? If the service is good you should find a hint at least. Something to start with. I find that I sometimes miss the actual logs in the event viewer because it is so "crowded". My take on it: empty the log and stop and restart the service.
Something locking / blocking: If the service installs and runs OK I would suspect other factors such as firewalls (hardware & software), security software in general (anti-virus, malware scanners), network configuration issues (proxies, WINS, DNS and all the complexities involved in networking). Is the service trying to reach an UNC path?
Diverse Machines: What are the target machines? Are they virtual, are they physical, are they test machines, are they operative SOE machines in corporate networks? Are they the same OS version and edition?
Further Ideas: It is not quite related, but maybe skim this list of suggestions for debugging from another answer (I am not sure why it was down-voted, I think it is an OK list to inspire debugging ideas): Windows Application Startup Error Exception code: 0xe0434352 (maybe just skim the bolded words for ideas - Recommended).
sc.exe: And finally, perhaps check the sc.exe tool (Service Control) and see if it can provide you with some useful information for debugging.
sc.exe in the context of killing hung services (sample use).
sc.exe from MSDN
Some further links:
Windows Services Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). Content seems to be up to date - at face value at least. These guys claim to be experts on services. I have no idea who they are.
Essential Tools for Windows Services: SC.EXE
Run Service Control (sc.exe) command on secure port
After almost 20 months we finally (and accidentally) found a solution to the problem! For the few machines, on which the service did not run properly, setting the NoInteractiveServices value in the registry to 0 did the trick. A value of 1 (which is default) means that no service is allowed to run interactively, regardless of whether it has the SERVICE_INTERACTIVE_PROCESS property. More information on Interactive Services.
I am not completely satisfied with the solution, because on all the other machines NoInteractiveServices is set to 1 AND the service runs properly anyway. However, on the machines where the service did not run interactively this solution worked for us. Thus I will accept this as an answer.
If anyone has more information on this issue and can explain why this works, feel free to
add them - I would be very interested!
Related
I had installed ColdFusion 2018 recently and with the installation less than a month old (and my understanding of the technology even less), my Cold Fusion service has stopped working. I have tried a number of things and have referred to a number of articles and out of many such errors where the service is not being accessible, some of them were able to get it resolved. However, some other obscure reason that may be causing this error have been untouched and unknown.
Whenever, I try to restart the service, I get an error as shown below:
Windows could not start the ColdFusion 8 Application Server on Local Computer. For more information, review the System Event Log. If this is a non-Microsoft service, contact the service vendor, and refer to server-specific code error 2.”
Without much understanding, I started to google it out. Looking into every one of these posts, I tried
Configure JRE and try to relaunch the service by looking at "JAVA_HOME" variable and JVM.config
Run the batch files in every possible combination to find if anything clicks
Check if the present JAVA version works and is compatible with Coldfusion version installed
Fiddling with the "SessionStorage" var in neo-runtime.xml file as some suggested
and few other tricks coupled with a numerous service restart attempts and a few machine reboots as well.
A service that renders Cold Fusion pages should be shut down abruptly. To add to agony, the CF Admin also depends on the service and hence does not work.
Any pointers to any potential solutions?
I know this is similar to a lot of questions on here, but I feel it's worth a new question since I have yet to discover a question that fully encompasses my problem. I've been struggling with this for a couple weeks, read pretty much every answer to every question about it on here, as well as countless blogs, articles and other Q&A forums. So, here goes:
I created a service to monitor several things on our network and update a database with the information. Moved it to a server and went threw a lot of frustration with getting the WMI and DCOM settings right so that it would work.
I recently had my computer crash on me and so I lost my code and had to recreate the service from scratch/memory. It runs perfectly fine on my laptop. I moved it to a server(different than the one that is running the old version of the service). It runs there, but it is unable to reach the PCs I am monitoring. I try running the command line WMI query and can't connect there either. Getting the 'RPC Server is unavailable' error.
I've tried changing settings as per all of the articles/answers I've been able to find and cannot get it to connect.
A few relevant things:
All the RPC/WMI related services are running on both server and
monitored PCs.
The firewall is disabled on both server and monitored PCs.
I know the user and password are correct and have admin rights
on monitored PCs.
Server in question is (I believe, will confirm with someone later)
Windows Server 2008 R2 on a virtual server, if that makes a
difference.
Able to ping PCs and run tracert from server.
Here's where it doesn't make sense to me. I am able to run the wmic command from my laptop to the monitored PC. And from my laptop to the server. Wmic works locally on the server, but whenever I try to make a remote call, it fails with the RPC error.
I don't know much about networking, and we are a small company so we don't really have a Network Admin or anything. So, any and all advice would be appreciated.
I am using Coldfusion MX8 server and one of the scheduled task was running from 2 years but now suddenly from 01/12/2014 scheduled tasks are not running. When i browsed the file in browser then the file is running successfully without error.
I am not sure is there any updatation or license expiration problem. I am aware that mid of this year Adobe closed the support for coldfusion 8.
The first most common problem of this problem is external to the server. When you say you browsed to the file and it worked in a browser, it is very important to know if that test was performed on the server desktop. Knowing that you can browse to the file from your desktop or laptop is of small value.
The most common source of issues like this is a change in the DNS or network stack that is interfereing with resolution. For example, if the internal DNS serving your DMZ suddenly starts serving the "external" address - suddenly your server can't browse to your domain. Or if the IP served by the server for the domain in question goes from being 127.0.0.1 to some other IP that the server can't acces correctly due to reverse proxy or LB or some other rule. Finally, sometimes the Apache or IIS is altered so that an IP that previously was serviced (127.0.0.1 being the most common example) now does not respond.
If it is something intrinsic to the scheduler service then Frank's advice is pretty good - especially look for "proxy schduler" entries in the log - they can give you good clues. I would also log results of a scheduled task to a file. Then check the file. If it exists then your scheduled tasks ARE running - they are just not succeeding. Good luck!
I've seen the cf scheduling service crash in CF8. The rest of CF is unaffected.
Have you tried restarting the server?
Here are your concerns:
Your File (works since you tested it manually).
Your Scheduled Task (failed).
Your Coldfusion Application (Service) (any changes here)?
Your Server (what about here).
To test your problem create a duplicate task and schedule it. Leave the other one in place (maybe set your new one to run earlier). Use the same file too. See if it completes.
If it doesn't then you have a larger problem. Since the Coldfusion Server sits atop of the JVM there could be something happening there. Things just don't stop working unless something got corrupted or you got compromised. If you hardened your server by rearranging/renaming the file structure to make it more secure...It would break your task.
So going back: if your test schedule works then determine what is different between the two. Note you have logging capabilities. Logging abilities for CF8
If you are not directly incharge of maintaining this server, then I would recommend asking around and see if there was recent maintenance, if so, what was done to the server?
Does anyone have a good way to set up multiple CFML engines, and versions of them, together in a suitable environment for cross testing a CFML based application.
Ideally, I'd like this to be Ubuntu Server based as I'm using it with VirtualBox (under Windows 7). Plus it'd be helpful if it was possible to switch between, so my laptop can cope with one at a time rather than all running at once. I'm thinking of the following:
Adobe ColdFusion 9
Adobe ColdFusion 10
Railo 3.3.x
Railo 4.x
OpenBD 2.x
I'd also like to get them serving from the same shared directory, so I don't have to have a copy of the code for each engine. Cheers
You mentioned being able to "switch between, so my laptop can cope with one at a time rather than all running at once", I'm guessing that you are thinking that each one will run on a different VM, or that they might require a huge amount of memory. I don't think you need to worry about that. Unless you require that they be on different machines, I think you could do this all on one VM and with one instance of a servlet container (like Tomcat).
From a high-level view, here is how I would do it.
Install Tomcat
Create or download .wars for each of the engines.
Deploy said .wars to that one instance of Tomcat
Set up Tomcat to use each of those servlets from a different host name (server.xml)
Create a code directory outside of Tomcat for your one copy of the code
Set up a Symbolic link in each webapp to link the code folder into the servlet
You should then be able to hit the same source from each engine by visiting the different host names in the browser.
I may be missing something. It has been a long time since I set something like this up. You'll likely need to make a bunch of tweaks (JVM settings, switching to Sun/ORACLE JVM vs. OpenJDK, etc).
I don't think running this many engines will cause you great trouble. In my experiences, for development, I have had 3 instances of CF9 running on Tomcat using only 189mb of RAM. And each additional instance did not increase that number by 1/3. Far less. It would not surprise me if you could run all of those handily with less than 512md of RAM. Possibly even 256mb if you are really hurting on memory.
I hope this helps.
For ColdFusion 10, Railo and OpenBD you would be looking at deploying with standalone installations of Tomcat, Jetty or JBoss.
ColdFusion 9, probably the easiest solution is "Enterprise Multiserver configuration" setup.
With these kinds of installation they are pretty much platform agnostic.
The things to be aware of are the web server, proxy and jndi ports that are used by each installation, but only if you want to run more than one server at a time.
After that it's whether you are bothered about proxying from apache or Nginx to the server instances and the connector you want to use.
No idea if this helps...
Since you've mentioned the VirtualBox, I'll share my personal approach to this task. It includes few fairly simple steps:
Install Ubuntu Server as VirtualBox guest (host is also Ubuntu).
Set up only basic software like JVM and updates. Set up virtual
machine networking as bridged adapter to use my Wi-Fi connection.
Configure my Wi-Fi router DHCP to assign static IP for MAC address of the virtual machine.
Add entry to my (host) system hosts: ip_assigned_to_vm virtual.ubuntu
Set up guest additions and mount my ~/www directory inside the machine to access web applications.
Now, when I need another machine for experiments, or some other configuration of software (I've tested ACF 10 and Railo 4 this way) I do two things:
Clone existing clean machine.
Make sure it is using the same MAC address with bridged interface.
That's it.
It doesn't matter which of the machines I run, they all can be accessed as http://virtual.ubuntu (of course, it requires proper web-server configuration on the guest). Same time they are independent and it is completely safe to make anything I wish and test anything that runs on Ubuntu.
Obvious downsides are that I can run just one machine at a time, plus much more disk space is used. Not a problem to me.
I've tried approach with Tomcat and multiple WARs, but it has couple of issues: I can't use different JVM and Tomcat settings, also if I screw the setup -- all the Tomcat hosts are down.
Hope this helps.
We are using Hudson to build mixed C++/Java projects with an Ant script. It is running in Tomcat 6, on a Win XP virtual machine.
I have noticed recently that when a user logs off the machine (from a remote desktop session), builds that are currently running tend to suddenly fail without an error message.
Has anyone encountered anything similar or have an idea what might be causing this effect? I can post additional information about our setup if needed, I'm just not sure what's relevant in this case.
EDIT: I have tried running the Tomcat service under various users, but this doesn't seem to help. Tried the standard Local System account, as well as the server Administrator and a domain administrator account.
Try adding -Xrs to the Tomcat JVM arguments.
For more information see this bug.