This is essentially a follow up of the following question:
How to increase/decrease the number of instances of a windows service?
I've tried the following:
installutil /instance_name=instance1 mysvc.exe
The above command does the job of installing the service; and you can see the service listed in the mmc console (services.msc) as "instance1". But while debugging I've noticed that the ServiceName property is showing the value that I set in the designer at design time.
I was expecting it to show "instance1". How to correctly resolve this problem?
Related
I'm working with the following:
Docker for Windows v20.10.11
Docker running in Windows container mode
mcr.microsoft.com/windows:1903 base image
Proprietary application installed on top of this base image
Each year we create a Docker image with the latest version of our company's software. However this year's version behaves differently. Host machine installation runs fine. Containerized installation fails to run in certain situations. I can start the application as a simple EXE, for example using the Docker run command. The app will start and show up in "tasklist". However I can't start the app via the COM API, which is a critical requirement. The problem appears to be COM related. Normally we can create COM objects for our software just like for any other application. For example, IE returns a COM object just fine:
Creating these objects for our application works outside containers. However inside the container, our latest installation gives this error:
Access permissions appear to be ok. I tried a couple tests to prove this. First I can install other software like MS Word into a container and create COM objects for that:
Second I tried retrieving + modifying the application's DACL in PowerShell.
Changing access masks or trustees can cause an Access Denied error:
This also appears to confirm the access permissions were Ok by default.
Next I made sure COM is aware of the application. This appears to be fine. I get the same result on host machine and container when running this PS script:
gci HKLM:\Software\Classes -ea 0| ? {$.PSChildName -match '^\w+.\w+$' -and
(gp "$($.PSPath)\CLSID" -ea 0)} | ft PSChildName
The application shows up just like any other. The details show up fine when querying by AppID. LocalServer32 points to the correct EXE:
Some other things I tried:
Querying registry keys. There are 7 keys created when installing our software. These appear identical on host machine install and container install.
Even though permissions appear fine, I still tried logging into the container as alternate users. For example "nt authority\system" is another virtual admin user. I also changed the password of the "builtin\administrator" user to enable logging in with that one. Lastly tried creating new users entirely and adding them to the Administrators user group. All these attempts had the same errors as "builtin\containeradministrator" (default user).
A minor check was ensuring CMD.exe / Powershell is running as x64:
Re-registering the DLLs associated with the installation using regsvr32.
Starting from different base images. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/manage-containers/container-base-images. The full Win Server base image behaves exactly the same way regarding errors. The smaller Win Server Core base image is even more problematic, as I can't even start the app's EXE manually using that base. Lastly I tried other tags of the full Windows base image such as 20H2 and 2004. Same result from those. Multiarch or x64 makes no difference.
Included the "Ogawa hack" which was historically needed to make MS Office apps function correctly with COM: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1680214/7991646. It could be necessary for other COM apps too, but didn't help with my specific installation.
Is there anything else I can do to diagnose or solve this COM issue?
There are several things to consider:
The Considerations for server-side Automation of Office article states the following:
Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support, Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended, non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, ASP.NET, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when Office is run in this environment.
If you are building a solution that runs in a server-side context, you should try to use components that have been made safe for unattended execution. Or, you should try to find alternatives that allow at least part of the code to run client-side. If you use an Office application from a server-side solution, the application will lack many of the necessary capabilities to run successfully. Additionally, you will be taking risks with the stability of your overall solution.
The When CoCreateInstance returns 0x80080005 (CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE) page describes possible reasons.
If many COM+ applications run under different user accounts that are specified in the This User property, the computer cannot allocate memory to create a new desktop heap for the new user. Therefore, the process cannot start. See Error when you start many COM+ applications: Error code 80080005 -- server execution failed for more information.
Finally, you may find a similar thread here helpful, see Server execution failed (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80080005 (CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE)).
I have an image with a GUI application, with base image of microsoft/windowsservercore. Application is installed correctly in the image, however I'm unable to display it on host machine. Have read several articles on this on Google and they suggest to install XServer for Windows and then we can display the application on host machine. I have been trying to run following command (as suggested in most of the articles), however it does nothing and I don't get the display. Please assist.
docker run --rm -it -e DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0 eft
The DISPLAY would be useful for Linux container.
As mentioned here:
WindwosServerCore image does not come with binaries for UI applications so I doubt this will ever work in servercore image but Microsoft insiders can use new bigger WindwosServer image which I beleive have those libraries intact.
This thread adds:
I understand that you can run GUI apps but the rendered elements are not shown on any desktop. Lars Iwer [MSFT] writes in the discussion below the article:
In the container image as it is right now, GUI elements will be rendered in session 0. UI automation should work with that (e.g. programmatically searching for a window etc.).
Session 0 is the session in which all system services are run and is by definition non-interactive. Sessions, Stations and Desktops are means of isolation in Windows (NT) and whether an application can show a UI and receive user interaction depends on whether it has an access to a Station with a Desktop.
Processes in Session 0 do not have that by default.
However it used to be possible to “Allow services to interact with Desktop” and it is also possible to run interactive services in other sessions than Session 0 (pay attention to “as it is right now”). Therefore, it would be interesting to hear some expert insights from Microsoft/Docker team on that…
In the Rest Webservice Command, I don't see any option to pass a variable in the URI.
We do not want to hard the end point in the script.
As an e.g I will want the script to use different points for dev/stage and prod.
Is there a work around for this.
On building a URI with variables like :
https://$v_hostname$/test-rs-v1/employee/data send request works fine but
bot runs we get an error stating :
Hostname could not be parsed.
Update: That was a bug and fixed on version 11.3.1. You can only achieve that on version 11.3.1 or later.
Reference: https://docs.automationanywhere.com/bundle/enterprise-v11.3/page/topics/release-notes/release-notes-11-3-1.html
Workaround for older versions (If you have experience with C#): Build and test DLLs
The following applies only on version 11.3.1 and later.
Make sure that $v_hostname$ contains a value at the run time, using debugging option or message box command.
I did reproduce the same error by entering a variable that doesn't exist or doesn't have a value, there is no another scenario would reproduce "Hostname could not be parsed".
If the hostname/URL is invalid you will get "The remote name could not be resolved:".
I've tested the REST Web Service command on both community and enterprise editions, and it's working very well.
I have an application(app1) that uses another application(app2)'s DLL to do some things. The problem is that I need to have some current user registries set for the DLL to work. If I call app2 from the advertised shortcut it will invoke windows installer self-healing and populate its registries. However if I've just installed app2 from another user,logged in for the first time, and used app1 it will fail as the DLL will not have it's registries populated.
With this in mind I tried to use the Self-Invoked Resiliency method to trigger MSI self-healing.
The "HKCU" feature is the top feature containing a single component "HCKURegistry" which only contains registry keys. The keypath for the "HCKURegistry" component is a key in the HKCU hive.
I'm using Delphi XE3 and here is the line of code:
szProductCode :='{293A0959-6ECF-4026-929B-ECC777934525}';
szComponent:= '{45282475-634F-4222-81BA-030FA63703BD}' ;
MsiProvideComponent(pwidechar(szProductCode),pwidechar('HKCU'),pwidechar(szComponent),INSTALLMODE_DEFAULT, lpPathBuf,#pcchPathBuf);
When, however, my app1 executes this line the Windows Installer displays a windows installer "Preparing to install..." window and stays like this forever. If I click "Cancel" it says "Canceling..." and stays like this until I kill the app from the task manager.
The Event log shows two items:
Detection of product '{293A0959-6ECF-4026-929B-ECC777934525}', feature 'HKCU', component '{45282475-634F-4222-81BA-030FA63703BD}' failed.
Detection of product '{293A0959-6ECF-4026-929B-ECC777934525}', feature 'HKCU' failed during request for component '{45282475-634F-4222-81BA-030FA63703BD}'
A possibly relevant information. When I trigger the self healing the normal way I get the same two lines but the second one has additional sentence (the keypath registry key for the component):
Detection of product '{293A0959-6ECF-4026-929B-ECC777934525}', feature 'HKCU', component '{45282475-634F-4222-81BA-030FA63703BD}' failed. The resource 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MyData\SomePath' does not exist.
I moments of desperation I tried using:
res:=MsiReinstallFeature(pwidechar(szProductCode),pwidechar('HKCU'),REINSTALLMODE_USERDATA);
And swapping INSTALLMODE_DEFAULT for REINSTALLMODE_USERDATA in the MsiProvideComponent call. Both behaved differenty in that they did not put anything into the Event log. Otherwise they both stuck in "Preparing to install..." just as the original call...
I'm stuck on this for a while now. Can someone spot what I'm doing wrong?
Whenever a specific Windows service fails I want to run a program I've created myself. However, I simply can't find a way to make it fail on purpose, so that I can actually test that everything works correctly.
Note that the service in question is not something I've written myself, so I can't make it fail programmatically from inside the code. I wouldn't, however, mind writing a program that can make a service fail.
Of course I would prefer just having a "Make service fail" button somewhere in services.msc ... ;)
The server I'm doing this on is running Windows Server 2012.
If you don't want to use command line :
As an admin open the Windows Task Manager, in the Services tab find the service you want to test. Right click the service and click on Go to process. The selected process (if any) is the one corresponding to your service. Kill this process to simulate a service failure.
Be aware that killing a process this way can lead to problems.
Define "fail". If you want the process to end, just use pskill or a similar tool that can terminate a process elevated (as an admin).