I have a BPA7 workflow that creates a file on our network every 30 minutes. A timed Automate 6 task running on another PC looks for the file and if found ends the task.

If not found a warning (pager and email) is sent to check the BPA7 application. To enhance this process I want the Automate 6 task to reboot the BPA7 server to reset the application if the file is not found.

Both BPA7 server and agent run on the BPA7 server and are set to automatic to start these services. When the server is rebooted using the local system account the BPA7 application does not trigger any scheduled or file watch triggers. Any ideas why this doesn't work?

Category Survey

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Bob Greenwood
BPA8, W2K3 Server,
VMWare, XP Clients

Bob,
I suspect BPAEM.exe to not be running. Can you check that in Windows task manager ?

When I have such problems I run the attached task that resets everything (I name it AutomateBPAReset.aml) from a shortcut as hereunder
"C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\BPATask.exe" "\\Hp-1490\SharedDocs\Mes Tâches AutoMate\AM7\AutomateBPAReset.aml"
Of course you should customize the aml file location to your system.

You could try it and see what happens.

Category Survey

Task Steps: (Right click, Select All, Copy to copy to the clipboard. Steps can then be pasted into the AutoMate Task Builder)
<AMTASK> <AMTASKHEAD> <TASKINFO TASKVERSION="7082" /> </AMTASKHEAD> <STEPS> <AMVARIABLE NAME="ServerHost">192.168.1.10</AMVARIABLE> <!-- Determine whether Agent and/or Server exist on this computer --> <AMMESSAGEBOX WINDOWTITLE="AutomateBPAReset" MODAL="NO">Beginning</AMMESSAGEBOX> <AMVARIABLE NAME="ServerExists">%false%</AMVARIABLE> <AMGETSERVICESTATUS SERVICENAME="AutoMate BPA Server" RESULTVARIABLE="ServerExists" AM_ONERROR="CONTINUE" /> <AMSET VARIABLENAME="ServerExists">%IIf(ServerExists&lt;&gt;0, True, False)%</AMSET> <AMVARIABLE NAME="AgentExists">%false%</AMVARIABLE> <AMGETSERVICESTATUS SERVICENAME="AutoMate BPA Agent" RESULTVARIABLE="AgentExists" AM_ONERROR="CONTINUE" /> <AMSET VARIABLENAME="AgentExists">%IIf(AgentExists&lt;&gt;0, True, False)%</AMSET> <!-- Stopping BPA services and processes --> <AMIF EXPRESSION="%AgentExists%"> <AMSERVICESTOP SERVICE="AutoMate BPA Agent" STOPIFMASTER="YES" AM_ONERROR="CONTINUE" AM_RETRY="3" AM_RETRYDELAY="1000" AM_ERRORS="" /> <AMWAITFORPROCESS ACTION="end" PROCESS="C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\AMTS.exe" AM_ONERROR="CONTINUE" AM_TIMEOUT="3000" /> <AMIF PROCESS="C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\AMTS.exe"> <AMENDPROCESS PROCESS="C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\AMTS.exe" CLOSEMESSAGE="NO" AM_ONERROR="CONTINUE" AM_RETRY="3" /> </AMIF> <AMWAITFORPROCESS ACTION="end" PROCESS="C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\AMTS.exe" AM_ONERROR="CONTINUE" AM_TIMEOUT="3000" AM_RETRY="3" /> <AMPAUSE SCALAR="2" /> </AMIF> <AMIF EXPRESSION="%ServerExists%"> <AMSERVICESTOP SERVICE="AutoMate BPA Server" STOPIFMASTER="YES" AM_FAILACTION="4" /> <AMWAITFORPROCESS ACTION="end" PROCESS="C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\BPAS.exe" AM_TIMEOUT="3000" /> <AMPAUSE SCALAR="2" /> </AMIF> <AMIF EXPRESSION="%AgentExists%"> <AMENDPROCESS PROCESS="C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\BPAEM.exe" SAMEPROCESS="all" AM_ONERROR="CONTINUE" /> <AMWAITFORPROCESS ACTION="end" PROCESS="C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\BPAEM.exe" /> <AMPAUSE SCALAR="2" /> <AMIF EXPRESSION="%not ServerExists%"> <AMREGISTRY ACTION="write_value" KEY="HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Network Automation\BPA Agent\TaskService\Agent" VALUE="Host" VALUEDATA="%ServerHost%" /> <AMPAUSE ACTION="waitfor" SCALAR="2" /> </AMIF> </AMIF> <AMMESSAGEBOX WINDOWTITLE="AutomateBPAServerReset" COUNTDOWNDELAY="2">BPA Server Processes and Services stopped</AMMESSAGEBOX> <!-- Restarting BPA services and processes --> <AMIF EXPRESSION="%ServerExists%"> <AMSERVICESTART SERVICE="AutoMate BPA Server" AM_RETRY="3" AM_ERRORS="20101" AM_ERROREXCLUDE="YES" /> <AMWAITFORPROCESS PROCESS="C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\BPAS.exe" AM_TIMEOUT="3000" /> <AMPAUSE SCALAR="2" /> </AMIF> <AMIF EXPRESSION="%AgentExists%"> <AMSERVICESTART SERVICE="AutoMate BPA Agent" AM_RETRY="3" AM_ERRORS="20101" AM_ERROREXCLUDE="YES" /> <AMWAITFORPROCESS PROCESS="C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\AMTS.exe" AM_TIMEOUT="3000" /> <AMPAUSE SCALAR="2" /> <AMRUN FILE="C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\BPAEM.exe" /> <AMWAITFORPROCESS PROCESS="C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\BPAEM.exe" /> <!-- The delay here is necessary for waiting the agent to reconnect to the server. It may not be sufficient. --> <AMPAUSE SCALAR="10" /> </AMIF> <AMMESSAGEBOX WINDOWTITLE="AutomateBPAReset" COUNTDOWNDELAY="2">BPA Processes and Services Restarted</AMMESSAGEBOX> </STEPS> </AMTASK>

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Jean Delfosse - Automate Beta Tester
Win7 Pro 64 bits -Win XP Pro SP3 32 bits - AM8, AM7, BPA10, BPA9, BPA8, BPA7, AM6 Enterprise, AM4

Jean

I am just getting back to this. The problem I am having is BPA7 hicups every so often without warning. It will stop running any tasks. When I go into services I can manually stop the agent service but when I try to stop the server service it errors with 1053 (service not responding) and hangs in stopping status. I then have to reboot the server to get BPA7 running again.

I know when this happens based on the Automate 6 task that runs as explained earlier in is thread. Yes I wish I knew why it fails but for now I am just trying to have the server reboot itself and resume operation without manual intervention (like in the middle of the night!!). BPA7 doesn't want to run any tasks after a reboot without someone logging in which makes me think the BPA7 services don't start until that happens.

I am not sure where your restart process would figure into this process.

Category Survey

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Bob Greenwood
BPA8, W2K3 Server,
VMWare, XP Clients

Under Options | Default Task Properties : Logon you should be able to control whether tasks execute even when the machine is logged off. Be aware that when tasks execute while a machine is logged out they cannot do anything interactive because there is no desktop.

Category Survey

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Dustin Snell

I always set all these options to run as background user (default user) in agent options which should allow tasks to run.

What about under default properties indicators agent icon in tray (always). Does this mean that tasks will not run on a reboot because the icon cannot be loaded?

Category Survey

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Bob Greenwood
BPA8, W2K3 Server,
VMWare, XP Clients

Hi Robert,

The icon being loaded does not necessarily mean that is the problem. It seems to be more server than agent related. Are there any messages in event viewer that reference BPA? Is the BPA Server and Agent service using its default configuration or has a different user other than Local System been assigned to the services? Are you logged onto the console directly or through a remote session?

Category Survey

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Leonard Amabile | Director, Cross Platform Support
AutoMate | InterMapper | Skybot | Divisions of HelpSystems
T: +1.213.738.1700 | F: +1.213.738.7665

Attached are the BPA event viewer errors. These are from two separate servers. The services are using the default configuration (local system) user. The servers are VMWare servers logged on but locked at the time of failure.

I found that the first error relates to the log size failure common to BPA7.

Category Survey

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Bob Greenwood
BPA8, W2K3 Server,
VMWare, XP Clients

Edited: 08/06/2009 at 02:16 PM by RobertGreenwood

The first error message refers to your ExecutionEvents.xml taking too long to be written to. This is due to its filesize.

Please check your Options>Server Settings>Log Management and let me know what are the settings. You may also want to click on the Clear Execution Events button to clear the file.

Category Survey

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Leonard Amabile | Director, Cross Platform Support
AutoMate | InterMapper | Skybot | Divisions of HelpSystems
T: +1.213.738.1700 | F: +1.213.738.7665

Log events are set to be cleared older than 7 days.

Category Survey

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Bob Greenwood
BPA8, W2K3 Server,
VMWare, XP Clients

Robert,
BPA service getting into perpetuel stopping state is really a problem.
If you cannot kill it with the service console, you always can kill the process xith Windows task manager.
I designed a task that stops (or if necessary kills) all of BPA then restarts it properly. Attached. Of course, it should not be run as a managed task, because if the service is down it would never run.
It can be run from a shortcut or from any OEM application or Windows scheduler.

Category Survey

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Jean Delfosse - Automate Beta Tester
Win7 Pro 64 bits -Win XP Pro SP3 32 bits - AM8, AM7, BPA10, BPA9, BPA8, BPA7, AM6 Enterprise, AM4

For now I have my auto reboot process in-place and working so if BPA7 stops working on either server the server will be rebooted without manual intervention sending a notification that the reboot occured.

If the event log size and task log sharing issues are addressed in the next release that should improve stability even more.

Category Survey

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Bob Greenwood
BPA8, W2K3 Server,
VMWare, XP Clients

Hi Robert,

The upcoming release of BPA definitely does address those issues.

Category Survey

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Leonard Amabile | Director, Cross Platform Support
AutoMate | InterMapper | Skybot | Divisions of HelpSystems
T: +1.213.738.1700 | F: +1.213.738.7665

Jean~
we are having a related issue that i was hoping you might shed some light on...
in addition to the occasional server lock-ups, we seem to have an issue with tasks that do PGP encryption failing due to Memory issues. i assume we have a memory leak somewhere in there and rebooting the server seems to clear it up.
i would like to establish with our IT dept a regular reboot of the server, but the problem is identifying a time when there are no tasks running. i assume bad things will happen if we reboot while BPA7 is busy. and its always busy.
maybe if we stop the service manually first? but, if a task is in the middle of running, what would happen if the service was shut off?
is there some way to force an orderly shutdown, and reliable subsequent resumption?
if a schedule point is missed, does the task fire when service is resumed, or wait for the next schedule point? what about a file watcher?

we have some tasks that wait for a database to be available before proceeding, and these sometimes sit there for days waiting. so there are almost always at least these tasks running, on top of the hundred+ others that operate daily. we move large volumes of data and many of these tasks take many hours to run.

do you have any ideas on some automated or manual process that we could follow to support the need for a regular server reboot without disrupting scheduling or dropping tasks in progress?
thanks in advance for your [always excellent] insights...
~jiva

Category Survey

Jiva,
your point is very interesting.
But I don't have a comprehensive answer
Here are my first impressions :

If one stops the service (agent), the currently running tasks would keep running, ( if they don't trigger other tasks), provided isolation is set to High, in which case each tasks runs in its own BPATask process.
About the scheduled tasks, they would resume upon restart of the agent according to what is specified in the trigger definition.

The major damage I think of is that the BPA reports would not report any event later than the service stop time.

If you have tasks waiting very long times for some event, they could be modified for them to wait in a loop where they test the presence (status) of the agent service, so that they can be programmatically stopped cleanly when the agent gets stopped, and not keep waiting.

One can also test for the tasks execution dry up by counting the BPATask processes still running.

These are just thoughts, Anyhow it is worth testing.

Category Survey

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Jean Delfosse - Automate Beta Tester
Win7 Pro 64 bits -Win XP Pro SP3 32 bits - AM8, AM7, BPA10, BPA9, BPA8, BPA7, AM6 Enterprise, AM4

Jean~
i have taken your suggestion and written a small app that IT can use to see if automate is busy at the moment. the user drops a text file that contains their email address into a watched folder, and automate sends them a report like the one pasted in below. of course, i only count processes like BPATask.exe, and i subtract this task from the total i report.

this only goes part way towards solving our problem tho. what we really want is a way for automate itself to detect if any tasks are running, and reboot the host machine the automate server runs on!

we have an old automate 6 install also on a separate machine that could possibly be involved in this. even if we Could do this, I'm wondering if we can count on the automate services coming back up properly all by themselves.

does this seem doable? any thoughts?

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BPA is Running....
Number of currently active BPA task processes: 1

12/14/2012 1:08:51 PM: ---[ ALL AUTOMATE PROCESSES.... ]---
12/14/2012 1:08:51 PM: [ProcessID 1372] C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\AMTS.exe
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: MaximumWorkingSetSize 1380
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: Data Read 103402517
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: Data Written 146779079
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: [ProcessID 1416] C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\BPAS.exe
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: MaximumWorkingSetSize 1380
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: Data Read 5576609
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: Data Written 6778870
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: [ProcessID 5028] C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\BPATask.exe
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: MaximumWorkingSetSize 1380
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: Data Read 781217
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: Data Written 871619
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: [ProcessID 2740] C:\Program Files\AutoMate BPA Server\BPATask.exe
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: MaximumWorkingSetSize 1380
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: Data Read 780307
12/14/2012 1:08:52 PM: Data Written 871526

Category Survey

Task Steps: (Right click, Select All, Copy to copy to the clipboard. Steps can then be pasted into the AutoMate Task Builder)
<!-- testing update --> <!-- extract the email address from the trigger file --> <AMVARIABLE NAME="triggerfilepath">%AMTrigger.Filename%</AMVARIABLE> <AMVARIABLE NAME="alltext"></AMVARIABLE> <AMVARIABLE NAME="emailSendTo"></AMVARIABLE> <AMVARIABLE NAME="reportText">BPA is Running....</AMVARIABLE> <AMVARIABLE NAME="currentProcess"></AMVARIABLE> <AMVARIABLE NAME="processCount" TYPE="NUMBER">0</AMVARIABLE> <!-- ***** GENERATE THE REPORT - TOTALS***** --> <AMLOOP TYPE="PROCESSES" RESULTVARIABLE="currentProcess" INCLUDE="*BPATask.exe" RESULTDATASET="processLoop"> <AMINCREMENTVARIABLE RESULTVARIABLE="processCount" /> </AMLOOP> <!-- *** DONT COUNT THIS CURRENT PROCESS *** --> <AMSET VARIABLENAME="processCount">%processCount - 1%</AMSET> <AMSET VARIABLENAME="reportText">%reportText% Number of currently active BPA task processes: %processCount%</AMSET> <!-- ***** GENERATE THE REPORT - DETAIL***** --> <AMSET VARIABLENAME="reportText">%reportText% %Now()%: ---[ ALL AUTOMATE PROCESSES.... ]---</AMSET> <AMLOOP TYPE="PROCESSES" RESULTVARIABLE="currentProcess" INCLUDE="*AUTOMATE*" RESULTDATASET="processLoop"> <AMSET VARIABLENAME="reportText">%reportText% %Now()%: [ProcessID %processLoop.ProcessID%] %currentProcess%</AMSET> <AMLOOP TYPE="DATASET" DATASET="processLoop"> <AMGETPROCESSINFO USEWMI="YES" PROCESSID="%processLoop.ProcessID%" RESULTDATASET="processInfo" /> <AMLOOP TYPE="DATASET" DATASET="processInfo"> <AMSET VARIABLENAME="reportText">%reportText% %Now()%: MaximumWorkingSetSize %processInfo.MaximumWorkingSetSize%</AMSET> <AMSET VARIABLENAME="reportText">%reportText% %Now()%: Data Read %Trim(processInfo.ReadTransferCount)%</AMSET> <AMSET VARIABLENAME="reportText">%reportText% %Now()%: Data Written %Trim(processInfo.WriteTransferCount)%</AMSET> </AMLOOP> </AMLOOP> </AMLOOP> <!-- ***** SEND THE REPORT ***** --> <AMFILEREAD FILE="%triggerfilepath%" RESULTVARIABLE="alltext" /> <AMLOOP TYPE="LIST" LIST="%alltext%" RESULTVARIABLE="emailSendTo" DELIMITER="new_line"> <AMVARIABLE NAME="emailSubject">BPA Active Task Report</AMVARIABLE> <AMVARIABLE NAME="emailBody">Dear %emailSendTo% %reportText%</AMVARIABLE> <AMSENDEMAIL TO="%emailSendTo%" SUBJECT="%emailSubject%" FROM="auto-mate@yourcompany.com">%emailBody%</AMSENDEMAIL> <AMFILEDELETE SOURCE="%triggerfilepath%" /> </AMLOOP>

Jiva,
a WMI invoked from basic script could hopefully do it as shown here

I did not try it by myself. Could you ? and tell me the outcome ?

A few more solutions can be found Googling "script to reboot the machine"

Category Survey

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Jean Delfosse - Automate Beta Tester
Win7 Pro 64 bits -Win XP Pro SP3 32 bits - AM8, AM7, BPA10, BPA9, BPA8, BPA7, AM6 Enterprise, AM4

Jean~
i will have to get buy-in from IT before i can deploy such a solution, especially since no-one else apparently is already doing this. [i wonder why? doesn't anyone else have memory leaks and need to reboot regularly?]. of particular concern is how reliably the automate services will come back up after a reboot all on their own.

cant say if or when this may go any further into test, but i will certainly keep you appraised.

Category Survey

Hi Jiva,

What version of BPA Server 7 are you running specifically? Is there a possibility you could upgrade to BPA Server 9? Both versions can run side by side.

Category Survey

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Liz Casale
Technical Support Representative
(213) 738-6966
Network Automation, Inc.

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AM5 5.5.5.1; AM6 6.2.8.0; AM7 7.1.3.0; AM8 8.0.9.0; AM9 9.0.3.4
BPA7 7.1.3.0; BPA8 8.0.9.0; BPA9 9.0.3.4