Ghost Solution Suite

We run Ghost 3.1 MP3 that has about 800 clients connecting to it, and while it works well when it is stable, that is the minority of the time.  We find that we constantly need to restart the "Altiris Deployment Server DB Management" service and the "Altiris eXpress Server" service.  Sometimes we are doing this upwards of 20 to 30 times a day!  What is worse is that sometimes the service claims it is still running, but we can't get machines to checkin, or tasks to run unless we restart those services.  We also find that deploying automation folders and getting machines to check in takes a long time regardless of it functioning or not.

This is obviously very frustrating and I will take any suggestions on what we can do to make these stable. We have already updated all windows updates, drivers, and firmware on the server with no luck. 

I've been using the Deployment Server product that GSS 3 is based on for over 15 years and have never seen that before. Occassionally the services will stop or stall but nothing like that.

Did it do it from new? Or what changed when it started to happen? Windows Updates, anti-virus update etc.?

Installing automation folders can take a while if automation has never beeing installed or you recently changed your automation setup.  This is because GSS restarts the DISM process of creating your automation folder installer in the background.  If that is what is happening in your case you will find Dism.exe in your task manager during your request to install an automation folder.  Furthermore, it will be a source of slowness that can't really be fixed.

For the service restarts, are the services stopping on their own?  Do you see any errors in the event log?  I ask because I had constant problems with the various services failing when I had some agents reporting using SSL while others didn't.  I had to slowly and painfully make sure that all my agents were communicating one way.  Once that was done all my random crash issues went away.

We had the same problem awhile ago with the service crashing all the time. The problem was caussed by a few clients trying to connect and encrypt the session.

To fix this issue I opened the Altiris Deployment Server Control panel on the server, under options and the transport tab I removed the check from "Allow encrypted sessions". This prevented any machine from connecting with an encrypted session and the services stayed running. If I had a particuliar machine that would not connect I would check the local agent settings on that machine and turn off encryption and it would connect to the GSS Server.

I checked in the "options" menu under "Agent Settings" and then went to "Change Default Settings" for the and our setting for "Windows Agent Settings".  The setting for "Encrypt session communication with Ghost Solution Suite Server" is already off, but some guys who do imaging mentioned they turned it off at the recommendation of Symantec after calling in.  We had deployed several clients to machines before turning off this setting, is it possible they are still utilizing this encryption even though the client default setting is now set to "off"? 

Another thing of interest, this only happens on our main server.  At our branch campus with another server 2008 R2 Ghost 3.1 server it runs perfectly.  The services literally never crash and the client/automation folders install happen immediately when pushed.  To answer some other questions from above, the issues with the service and slow client install happend right after install of this software.  Also as mentioned it only happens to one of our servers, and deploying the automation folders from our branch campus ghost server starts immediately and finishes in like 2 minutes.  Pushing from our main campus server which is a much faster server takes about 20 minutes to start, and then 10 minutes to finish.  Something is definately not correct.

I am not sure where to find logs, I checked the event viewer but found nothing in it.

Some additional news, the log files does have a repeating error relating to "dbmanager.exe" failing.  Log file is as follows:

Faulting application name: dbmanager.exe, version: 13.0.0.1246, time stamp: 0x5570c8d1
Faulting module name: MSVCR120.dll, version: 12.0.21005.1, time stamp: 0x524f7ce6
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00016b2e
Faulting process id: 0x27cc
Faulting application start time: 0x01d201f7269e1eec
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\dbmanager.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\system32\MSVCR120.dll
Report Id: a1d2986c-6dea-11e6-99ff-d4ae52afb564 

Check and compare the version levels of your Visual C++ redistributables between the working and faulty server.

That MSVCR120.dll is part of the MS C++ library.   If that is notworking/damaged all kinds of issuse could be seen.    You may want to check if there are any windows updates that could be applied to update these needed MS files.   

Googleing "Faulting module path: C:\Windows\system32\MSVCR120.dll"  will bring up a bunch of reading with folks having issues with all kinds of programs but not a silverbullet fix unfortunatly.  

Thank you everyone for the generous information regarding fixes for this.  I checked for windows updates but the server is all up to date.  I did also compare the two visual C++ levels for the two different servers and have attached a screenshot of the comparisons.  Any other recommendations are welcomed. 

FIXED!

After reviewing the Visual C++ levels, I unistalled all the versions and reinstalled them.  I then applied any updates needed and I haven't had an error in the event log since!  Both ghost services have been up for 2 hours straight while imaging which is unheard of previously!  This seems to have fixed it!  I will of course monitor this for a few more days but all seems well.  Thank you everyone especially andyk101 for the insight!  Also thank you Symantec for checking in with us on this issue.  Perhaps this could be written up someplace for others if they run into the issue?

To recap, download the latest installers for visual C++ 2008, 2010, and 2013.  MAke sure to get the 32 and 64 bit versions. Unistall your old versions, reinstall the new and update them. 

Thanks for letting us know. I'll remember that fix