I have two Windows services written in C# following the same patterns and methodology.
Both services were development tested against a Windows 7 VM and QA tested on Windows Server 2008 VM. Both services have been installed and uninstalled many times under these test environments without issue, however upon installing in the production environment (Windows Server 2008) one of the two services refuses to start.
To install the services we are using InstallUtil.exe with ServiceInstaller and ServiceProcessInstaller components attached to the service.
By all appearances, the failing service installs successfully. InstallUtil.exe reports success and the service appears in the Services snapin. You can also locate the service in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Blah Blah. However, if you attempt to start the service you get the following:
net start blah.blah.exe
"The service name is invalid."
...or going through the Services snapin...
"Windows could not start the "Blah Blah" service on Local Computer. Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion."
I have added some event logging to the constructor of the service class failing service, but it does not appear to get called.
As this is a production box, there is no Visual Studio on the box and remote debugging is out of the question.
Is there any other way for me to gain debugging info on why the failing service isn't starting?
Is there any other obvious-ish reason that I might see this kind of issue?
Edit: I should have also mentioned.. The only other evidence of a problem in the Windows Event Viewer is two messages in the System log from the Service Control Manager:
"A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the Blah Blah service to connect.
"The Blah Blah service failed to start due to the following error:
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion."
Edit: Resolved
The issue ended up being a combination of a configuration mistake and a bug that was hiding it. See my answer below for more details.
Jeopardy Answer: "How might invalid custom configuration combined with a bad global exception handler manifest itself in a .NET Windows service?"
Figured it out.
The root cause of the problem was an invalid custom configuration section in the app.config. We use a custom configuration section to configure the service from the app.config and the assembly and namespace of the ConfigurationSection derived class had changed recently.
As it turns out, our production configuration was looking for the definition of the custom ConfigurationSection in the wrong assembly and the exception thrown when failing to instantiate it was getting hidden by a bug where exceptions caught early in the life of the service would attempt to be logged to the custom log rather than the Application event log. (Since the event log source did not exist on the custom event log, this would throw another exception from the global exception handler and the service would die in the constructor.)
This second exception did not get logged anywhere and we only found it through code inspection.
The resolution was to fix the configuration and to modify the global exception handler to only attempt to write to the Application event log using the service name as the event log source. (InstallUtil registers the service name as an event log source on the Application log.)
Thanks for the help everyone! Sorry this particular issue ended up being so specific to our setup.
It could be possible from the error message that you've described
net start blah.blah.exe "The service name is invalid."
That the name that you gave the service in the service install component that you added in visual studio is not what you think it is.
I've had this problem quite a few times with developers misnaming services in installs.
what are you trying to do on service start?
also check the account through which the service is running and the account has the necessary privileges.
I've run into problems like this many times while programming my own services, so I'll just list out a bunch of things that at various points solved my problems and hope that they help you:
I've had to restart services.msc because I've uninstalled a service it still thought it had a reference to. However, when I would start it, the "service was invalid"
If you're making the service from a console application (so that it can be debugged) but forget to change it back to a service, it won't start.
When I was using InstallUtil.exe, sometimes it would attempt to install multiple copies, so I switched to just using a Setup Project.
Hope that helps in some way.
This is a common issue. What code do you have in your Start event?
You should only have code that activates a Timer when the service starts. This allows the Start event to complete quickly and notify the controller. If the execution takes longer than that, you will get the error you received. There might be some reason (possibly data-related) why its taking longer in production.
When the Timer ticks, execute your code and stop the Timer. Obviously, also put everything in try/catch and log the exceptions.
It is possible for this error to occur when
your service is depending on another service/application
or due to invalid app.config configurations
Encountered the same issue when Entity Framework was unable to connect to the database server due to lack of permission.
Better to add a global level error logging mechanism to your application to debug the issue easily.Event Viewer might not reveal exact details in some scenarios.
Related
I have a Windows service application which I have installed on my machine without issue. I went to install it on another machine, and I'm receiving the error
Error 1001. An exception occurred during the Commit phase of the installation. This exception will be ignored and installation will continue. However, the application might not function correctly after installation is complete. Cannot start service MyService on computer ‘.’. The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.
This error is popping up immediately without any hanging. Normally I would only expect to see this error after a hang.
I'm using the .NET 4 framework, which is installed on both machines. I've tried disabling the antivirus program thinking that might be interfering with the service startup, but that yielded the same error. The firewall was also disabled.
Is there anything else that could be causing this issue?
This behaviour usually occurs when an exception is thrown in the WinService's OnStart method and is not caught in a try-catch block. I believe you can check out the exception message and stack trace using the EventViewer, if not you can easily implement a simple logging functionality using the EventLog class.
Sometimes the exception is thrown because the service is not running under a privileged account. To fix this you have to configure your installer's ServiceProcessInstaller object like the following:
myServiceInstaller.Account = ServiceAccount.User;
myServiceInstaller.Username = "Domain name\User name";
myServiceInstaller.Password = "qwerty";
Thanks for your help everyone. I realized the issue was due to the .NET Framework installed on the two different machines. My machine had .NET Framework 4 Client Profile and .NET Framework 4 Extended, and the other machine only had .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. Evidently for some of the components in the service need libraries that aren't present in the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile.
Since your service runs on another computer, and assuming the code is the same for both, the issue may be something having to do with permissions. Ensure the account your service is running under has sufficient permissions to any folders where it writes files. If you write to the Event Log, ensure the service' account has the necessary permissions for that.
Solved the problem see the bottom of my post.
So I have a simple windows service that watches a specific folder and upploads files that come into it to a server using a web service.
It's working fine on my machine using windows 7 but when I try to start it on a windows server 2003, I receive an error: Error 1053: the service did not respond to start or control request in a timely fashion. But I get this message after only a few seconds.
I have created the ServicesPipeTimeout and set it to 60000 milliseconds.
I have tried running it from command line using sc query command and found out that the WIN32_EXIT_CODE is 0, which I think means that the service doesn´t even try to start because it find an error before it starts.
In the event viewer I get errors 7000 and 7009.
I am the Administrator on the windows server.
The only thing I haven´t tried is a hotfix I found from microsoft but I don´t want to use it because as I understand it, it is for when the service actually times out.http://support.microsoft.com/kb/886695
I have tried everything I can think of, is there anything that I am missing?
Gísli
EDIT: Re-installed the .NET framework and now I get a new error, Saying that the service controller can not be found.
EDIT: I setup the service with a setup project, not using the installutil command. This is because I need to get user input during the installation and save that in the registry.
EDIT: I have installed the .NET 4.0 framework, it wasn´t possible to install the service with out doing that.
In addition to what I wrote above I have also tried:
Rebooting.
Re-installing.
I have tried to change the permissions on the files that the service needs to access.
Changing permissions in the registry editor.
Edited the code so that the onStart function only starts one thread.
I think it is some kind of permission problem but I don´t have much experience dealing with Windows server.
Solution:
It turned out to be two seperate problems. The .NET framwork had to be repaired and I had to remove the try/catch clause that I had when starting the service. For some reason (unknown to me) the try catch block did something that made it impossible to start the service in a windows server 2003 but it ran fine on windows 7.
It would be very interesting to know why this is.
Thanks for all the help.
Gísli
Have you installed the right version of .NET Framework on the Server 2003 PC? What comes as standard on Windows 7 will need to be installed manually on an older OS.
You say "I have tried everything I can think of". Please edit the question to show what you have already tried so we don't suggest something you have already done.
EDIT:
Try also the Fusion Log viewer. Set it to log failures then start your service. Hit refresh then see if any errors are logged. Double-click a line for more details.
I'd guess that you installed the .NET 3.5 service using .NET 2.0? InstallUtil will work since the CLR is the same, but the service won't start because of .NET 3.5 dependencies.
See Also:
How to install a Windows service developed in .NET 3.5?
In your OnStart code you could wrap everything in a try-catch block and write the exception message and stack trace to a file using something like:
File.WriteAllText(#"C:\Temp\MyServiceLog.txt", exp.Message + exp.StackTrace);
This will help you analyze the problem. Also, I'm using a very simple way of debugging my services: I'm wrapping them in a WinForms wrapper if the session is interactive. For that, I need the following:
A form that creates an instance of the service class
New methods DoStart and DoStop in my service class, which are public and call the protected OnStart and OnStop methods
New code in above form's OnLoad and OnClose handlers, so the DoStart and DoStop methods of the service instance are called accordingly
Then I add the following code to the Main method in Program.cs:
if (Environment.UserInteractive)
{
Application.Run(new FormServiceHoster());
}
else
{
// ... old code to create service instance.
}
This way you're making the "service" run as an application when you just hit F5 in Visual Studio or double click the EXE in the Explorer. When the service is actually run as a service, the Forms-code is ignored.
Usually you can debug services by attaching to the process, however, that doesn't work for debugging the start and stop code. This method helps a great deal debugging the service start and stop code.
You will need to add references to System.Windows.Forms and System.Drawing manually.
This is the point where I bet you wish you had used some logging package like log4net, which might help tell how far your program gets.
Is it possible that the code in the OnStart event is actually taking longer than you expect. If so, you could move that code to a thread, so that the OnStart event finishes (and so Windows reckons the service has started) while your thread continues working.
Are you running the service as admin? If so, that usually rules out permissions issues. (If it still goes wrong, it will rule out the KB 886695 issue as that seems to only apply to local system).
Since you are using .NET 4.0 are you sure that either, the full version is installed, rather than the Client Profile, or that your application works with the client profile?
Created a simple WCF service that basically logs to a db.
the build is fine and created a msi install file for it.
I installed the windows service and start it which works, however when i stop it i get this error:
"Could not stop the service1 service
on local computer. The service did not
return an error. This could be an
internal windows error or an internal
service error. If the problem
persists, contact your system
administrator."
There are a couple of ways to diagnose this:
If you haven't already, separate out the implementation of the windows service from the actual service executable. That way you can run / debug the code from a console or forms app easily.
If that doesn't reveal any answers, add verbose logging to the shutdown method to find out what is happening.
I've been having issues getting a service to start. I have 2 other services are identical in configuration in just about every way that start fine, but one of them refuses to start and I really need to get it to work today. I can't see any difference in their implementation or config files. I'm receiving the following messages when attempting to start the service after installing it with InstallUtil:
The service is not responding to the control function
more help is available by typing NET HELPMSG 2186
NET HELPMSG 2186:
Explanation: The service cannot run your command at this time
If anyone has any thoughts and/or suggestions, they're GREATLY appreciated.
Thanks very much in advance!
Start by checking for any system/application events using EventVwr. The service could be crashing on startup or failing because of permissions for that particular service.
Try uninstalling and re-installing the service, with a reboot in between.
Also, see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/227404
Finally, do you have the MS Application verifier installed? If so, try to uninstall and reinstall it.
I have a custom-written Windows service that I run on a number of Hyper-V VMs. The VMs get rebooted a couple times an hour as part of some automated tests being run. The service is set to automatic start and almost all of the time, it starts up fine.
However, maybe 5% of the time, with no pattern that I can discern, the service fails to start. When it fails, I get an error in Event Viewer saying
A timeout was reached (30000 milliseconds) while waiting for the My Service Name service to connect.
When this occurs, I can start the service manually, or restart again, and the service will start fine.
The thing I can't figure out is that the 30 second timeout doesn't appear to be occurring in my code. The very first line of my service class's OnStart() method logs "Starting..." to its log4net log. When the service fails to start, I don't even get anything logged at all, which indicates to me that either log4net can't log for whatever reason, or the timeout is occurring before my OnStart() gets called.
The service runs on a variety of OSes, from XP all the way up to Win7 and 2008R2, and I know that setting the service to delayed start may solve this for Vista and later, but that seems like a hack.
I haven't been able to remote debug this because of the fact that it happens so intermittently and during system startup, and I'm at a loss as to further ways to try to figure out what's going on. Any ideas?
My guess - and that's all it is - is that the disk is thrashing hard during startup, to the point where the .NET Framework itself isn't starting in the 30 seconds that Windows allocates for services to start.
A kludgy workaround may be to set the service to start manually, then write a very small stub service in unmanaged code (e.g. C++, Delphi) to start the service.
Another approach may be to start the service remotely from another machine. The sc command should do the job nicely.
I was seeing this error in the Event Viewer when trying to install a service with powershell.
The problem I had was that I had different values for "Service Name" and "Service Display Name" in my powershell script to those that I had specified in the program.cs file of my Console Application.
For what it's worth, I discovered that I received this message (almost immediately upon service startup) because I did not have version 4.5 of the .NET framework installed on the target machine. I rolled back the version I was using to version 4.0 (which was already installed on the target machine) and the service worked as expected.
I think I may have also found another contributing factor to this kind of does not start on reboot error.
It appears that if the Windows Event Log is set to Overwrite Events > 7days.. size 512kb.. But a lot of activity has occurred within this window, then Event Log is effectively full because it can't overwrite the number of events generated inside that timeframe. If you set the eventlog to a much larger size OR to Overwrite as needed then you won't experience this issue
My issue with the same error was that the .Net installation on the server was not working correctly.
To figure this out:
I made a small console app with identical logic as the executing service, and I made a try-catch around the whole code piece, dumping it all out to console.
Not sure why the information didn't bubble up, but we saw the valuable messages about the Framework errors that we would never have seen otherwise.
We are having the same problem on Windows 2016 Server.
A fix that seems to be working is changing the user under which the service running from Local Service Account to local Administrator (not sure what's the cause).