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  • 1.  NGServer.exe error (Ghost Configuration Server keeps shutting down C0000005

    Posted Jan 19, 2007 05:14 PM
    Installed GSS 2.0 and all is fine until try to do an inventory refresh...part-way through the process, the Configuration server shuts down and I get :

    Symantec Ghost Configuration Server
    An exception has occurred of type C0000005
    E:\Ghost - E:\Ghost\ngserver.exe 11.0.0.1502

    0x343DE4F
    0x2EF0000
    0x3439E30
    0xFFFFE388

    Additionally, Event viewer shows:

    Faulting application ngserver.exe, version 11.0.0.1502, faulting module MachConf.dll, version 11.0.0.1502, fault address 0x0007de4f.


    I can restart the Configuration service; it runs for about 30 secs or so, then errors out again...the same error again and again...

    Any help would be appreciated...

    Thanks,

    Eric


  • 2.  RE: NGServer.exe error (Ghost Configuration Server keeps shutting down C0000005

    Posted Jan 19, 2007 08:32 PM
    Hmm. Generally, machconf.dll isn't involved in inventory refresh; it does handle retrieving the initial configuration of a newly-discovered client and the "Configuration Refresh" stage of a task if you checked that tickbox.

    The configuration data is stored in the "C:\Program files\Symantec\Ghost\db\data" directory in a set of numbered files (the numbers correspond to internal database keys), and the contents are a text-style dump of parts of the client's registry to do with network settings and the like.

    The most likely situation is that machconf.dll is processing one of those and has run into something that it doesn't expect, although if you can archive up the file "C:\Program Files\Symantec\Ghost\NGERROR.DMP" which has a memory dump of the process at the time of failure, that should allow us to confirm that. As well, it would be ideal if you could archive up the contents of the "C:\Program files\Symantec\Ghost\db\data" directory.

    Send me an e-mail to nigel dot bree at gmail dot com and I can supply you with upload instructions.


  • 3.  RE: NGServer.exe error (Ghost Configuration Server keeps shutting down C0000005

    Posted Jan 22, 2007 02:34 PM
    you're definitely on to something...I (inadvertently) misrepresented my problem...I't not an inventory refresh, but installing clients. (pushing the client install from the console)...So everything that you're saying makes sense...

    I found 1 file in the DB folder that had a 0kb filesize. I moved it out of the folder, but still get the same situation...,Also one of the PCs listed in the console is showing only the (what appears to be) MAC address instead of name (is that means anything at this point...)

    What can I look for in the DB folder now? I actually opened all of the individual files in notepad (they all opened OK; nothing appeared visibly corrupt)

    My next step is to just delete everything, reinstall server, and start pushing clients one-at-a-time until it bombs out...even at that though, once it starts 'stopping' the service, will I be able to uninstall the problem client without the Configuration Server? Will that even work? If the PCs have the clients already installed, won't they start uploading to the server onceit goes active?

    Thanks,

    Eric


  • 4.  RE: NGServer.exe error (Ghost Configuration Server keeps shutting down C0000005

    Posted Jan 22, 2007 04:19 PM
    > Also one of the PCs listed in the console is showing only the (what appears to be) MAC address instead of name (is that means anything at this point...)

    That's generally what's supposed to happen when the code in machconf.dll can't make proper sense of the configuration data, instead of just falling over dead with an exception. This also happens for a client that is first discovered when the client is running in DOS, as from a Ghost Boot Partition, since in DOS we didn't have access to the registry to gather all all the Windows config data (we could change that now, since we have code that can extract registry information from an image or from DOS, but it's a ways down the priority list).

    > What can I look for in the DB folder now? I actually opened all of the individual files in notepad (they all opened OK; nothing appeared visibly corrupt)

    They probably won't be corrupt; it'll just be a logic bug in the code where it finds one (perfectly valid) registry setting and then blindly assumes that some other registry setting is also present without actually checking, and goes boom.

    One way you can investigate this is to run the Sysinternals Process Monitor http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/processmonitor.mspx which is a really useful tool for digging into all kinds of things.

    What you should see when a machine is discovered is that a file in the db\data directory gets opened and written to, and closed - then machconf.dll loads and then the ngserver process reads from the file. Basically, whatever the last one it was reading from before it died was likely to be the problem.

    If you were installing a client (this can happen later on), then usually what happens is that the problem file will be one of the highest-number ones. That's because the file numbers correspond to the internal database key, which for a newly-found machine is always just one higher than the last known one. The other way is to sort them by last modified date, and one of the most recently changed files will probably be the culprit.

    If you can find the file, you'll probably be able to spot inside it the name of the problem client, and avoid that one until I can resolve the code problem.

    Once we have the file, I'll still need you to send it to me; what I can do with it is load it here into a console on a test machine while I'm running the code under a debugger, which will just point me right at the line of code that has the problem (and then I can whip up a fixed DLL for you to test.

    > Will that even work? If the PCs have the clients already installed, won't they start uploading to the server onceit goes active?

    You're right, they'll all start hammering on the server. Basically, to get this working I need to find out what's wrong in the code and give you a fixed DLL file.


  • 5.  RE: NGServer.exe error (Ghost Configuration Server keeps shutting down C0000005

    Posted Jan 23, 2007 02:18 PM
    I have sent you the DB itself, and the individual files from the data folder (to your gmail account). Any help would be appreciated...

    Thanks,

    Eric


  • 6.  RE: NGServer.exe error (Ghost Configuration Server keeps shutting down C0000005

    Posted Jan 24, 2007 03:36 AM
    Thanks for that; going through all the files I found one that contained a partially installed (or perhaps partially uninstalled) Novell logon client, and it was faulting when trying to access a missing setting.

    I've added a fix to the code and sent Eric a link to a test build; as to the cases where the clients are showing up with MAC addresses instead of names, those appeared to be caused by the configuration data files being truncated for some reason. However, before we investigate that we need to deal with the GP fault in case that's just a side-effect.


  • 7.  RE: NGServer.exe error (Ghost Configuration Server keeps shutting down C0000005

    Posted Feb 08, 2007 12:51 PM
    The neww DLL did the trick...Server stays up now. Still have the issue of a handful of clients as showing the MAC address instead of teh NETBIOS name, but I am going to mark this as answered as that is a separate issue from the ngserver.exe crashing...

    Thanks for the help...

    Eric