Tranquil IT Forum

Since versions 2.3.0.13503 and 05 (yesterday), I've been encountering numerous problems deploying the agent.
The setup process stops services and then fails to restart them.
On domain controllers, for example, it stopped the following services:
- DHCP Server
- DHCP Client
- Network Location Awareness
- Eventlog
- Windows Connection Management
- WINS.

I won't even describe the mess caused by the DHCP Server service being stopped...

Often, the setup freezes. If I go to the machine, I see the installation components doing nothing.
I restart the stopped services, and the setup resumes... or not.

This happens on both servers and workstations.

These are truly major problems; it's impossible to deploy the agent if I have to go back to each server to restart the services!

Hi Thomas,

the innosetup installer doesn't affect these services. There must be a side effect related to your configuration. The service management section hasn't changed since version 2.2 at the time of installation.

We received a report a year or two ago similar to your situation, but we were never able to reproduce the problem. If the problem occurs on each of your machines, we'd be interested to see what's happening in the event logs.

One possibility is the installation of msvcredist and the KBs required for Python 3.8 to function, which could trigger a machine reboot (this shouldn't happen). But that would mean that not only are the machines significantly behind on their Windows updates, but that for some reason the installation of the KBs and msvcredist initiated a machine reboot (this shouldn't happen, as the installation is done with /norestart).

We would need to see what's actually happening on a machine experiencing the problem. But anyway, even if I'm repeating myself, the WAPT agent installation does not affect the services mentioned.

Sincerely,

Denis

Following analysis of the problem with Thomas:

during updates, Windows keeps a list of files awaiting replacement at the next reboot. Indeed, the exclusive locking mechanism at the filesystem level means that a file opened for reading with a lock (even in read mode) by an application cannot be replaced until the lock is removed, i.e., before the application shuts down. Windows addresses this limitation by allowing the storage of a list of files to be replaced at the next restart.

This file list can be viewed in the wapt console in the hardware inventory by searching for the entry `reboot_needed`.

Windows provides a RestartManager service that the Innosetup installer (which waptsetup.exe uses) calls to determine if there are locked files that require a restart of the application or the machine. For an unknown reason, after Innosetup called the RestartManager service, it attempted to restart all network services.

A machine reboot allowed the pending files in the RestartManager list to be installed, and the installation then proceeded without issue.

We'll look into removing the call to restartManager during the WaptSetup.exe installation to avoid this rather rare but quite annoying scenario.

Thanks to Thomas for the debugging session.

Have a good day,

Denis