I'm getting requests from 'the Field' to make my agent deployment 'easier' but I'm at a loss as to how.
Right now, I provide a user Interface to install and configure the agents.
To deploy the agents, I relied on older Windows technologies, here are the steps I use:
Start dependent services via remote SCM
Copy the agent.MSI via the File Administrative shares
Configure the agent's settings via remote registry calls
Use WMI to remotely silently run the agent.msi
Use the Administrative shares to move the agent.msi to the program folder (for uninstalling later)
To allow all these steps to happen, I need:
1. the firewall to configured correctly
2. the 'installing' user has to have admin access to the remote computer
3. Remote File Admin shares have to be turned on.
4. (I turn on WMI and Remote Registry remotely)
This deployment system was built back in the 2003 days.
Is there some better way now? Maybe a deployment library I can use?
thank you.
The best you can do here is to create a properly behaving .MSI that supports silent installation. It is then up to your user communities to plan their own deployments using the tools of their choice such as SCCM. Much more detail is required in order to give exact suggestions.
Background:
With TestComplete 6 we have created a project which clicks few buttons in our application and performs few tasks. To automate it we have created a .bat file which installs our application (desktop) executes testexecute.exe in silentmode and uninstalls the application. This .bat file works fine when we execute it locally.
But when we execute this .bat file on a remote machine (teamcity agent) through teamcity I get "The 'My application' window is invisible and cannot be activated" error. Any UI action I try to execute fails because my application window in visible. It works fine till installing and starting my application, but once the application is started it can't execute any GUI task.
This weird behavior raised few doubts.
Why testexecute is unable to interact with the GUI?
Does the user account which teamcity uses to run testexecute.exe need special privileges on that machine?
How to execute TestExecute.exe on a remote machine and what things I need to take care of while doing it?
The TeamCity agent works as a system service which does not have access to GUI. This means that all processes invoked by it do not have access to GUI as well.
You can check the 'Run interactive' box for the agent service in the Services snap-in. However, you will still have to login to the machine in order to make the system to draw GUI and this will not guarantee that TestExecute will have enough permissions to access this GUI without any problems.
You need to find a way to run TeamCity build agent as an interactive app, not as a service.
You can also find more information on this topic here.
Our company produces cross-platform software and we have Bamboo instance which is building projects under various incompatible environments (linux, win, os x). There's a VM configured for building under each environment. So is it possible to run several remote agents on each VM to perform concurrent builds of different projects ?
Yes, that is possible. See the "Changing where the remote agent stores its data" section of the Bamboo Remote Agent Installation guide.
To make this work, for each remote agent you run on the same machine you will need to specify a different location defined for the agent to store its data (otherwise builds will fail trying to write to the same location).
Yes it is possible to run multiple remote agents on both windows and linux based hosts. I currently manage the remote agents for the linux hosts so I can't comment on the windows service remote agents.
I implemented the multiple remote agents buy first creating a folder for each agent, then on installation of each agent you specify the location for the bamboo.home of each agent.
On the bamboo master server you can rename the remote agent so you can tell the difference between the agent that is running you build job.
I can't comment on linux, but on Windows, yes you can.
If you change the Windows service name from the default 'Bamboo Remote Agent' to something like 'Bamboo Remote Agent 1', 'Bamboo Remote Agent 2' by:
uninstalling with the bin/uninstall-ntservcice
editing conf/wrapper.conf to change the service name and display name
reinstalling with the bin/install-nt-service
After doing this you should be able to run multiple agents fine.
I was able to create two agents on the same server. In this case I actually want the same bamboo-home set so that either agent can build to the same location ... just when some of my builds take longer, I have a second agent sitting around for the quicker builds that get queued up otherwise. In the bamboo-agent.sh, I changed:
APP_NAME, APP_LONG_NAME, and REAL_DIR
I didn't change anything in conf/wrapper.conf. And in the GUI I updated the name of the agents by clicking "Edit Details" on the agent capability page.
Just in case, I also made the agentUuid tag in bamboo-agent.cfg.xml empty thinking it would get overwritten when I started the agent. I didn't want to agents starting with the same Uuid even though I couldn't tell what this field was already used for.
As far as I can tell this worked as I expected. I could see two agents from the GUI and kicked off two builds simultaneously. FWIW, what I don't know if this is considered a hacked way of doing this or not.
I'm trying to run UI-tests (written using white). When I run them using NUnitConsole everything works fine. When I try to run them using TeamCity I get the following exception Test(s) failed. White.Core.UIItems.UIActionException : Couldn't find window with title Form1 in process 4132, after waiting for 5000 ms. What might be wrong? What could I do to make the test pass?
Not only does the build agent need to be set to interact with the desktop, but the desktop must be displayed in order for UI automation to work - desktop cannot be locked and screen saver must not be running. Is your agent on a headless machine? If you are using RDP to connect to the agent to check on things, when you close RDP, it locks the desktop. In this case, the automation will fail. Instead of using RDP, use a VNC viewer to log on to the box, rather than RDP, as VNC will not lock the desktop when you close it.
Another issue to consider is network access. If you are running TC agent as a service with access to desktop, then it will be running under service account which will not have access to network shares, etc... If this is a probelm, then you will not be able to run TC agent as a service, and will instead need to logon with a domain user and kick off the agent.bat file to start the agent.
Spent a lot of time solving this issue.
Main steps:
You need separate computer with teamcity build agend installed on it. Computer should have monitor and mouse.
The agent SHOULD NOT be launched and run as a Windows service (disable it if needed).
You should launch TeamCity build agent from .bat file (as administrator). To do this go to TeamCityBuildAgentfolder\bin and launch agent.bat file with start argument
Disable computer's screen sleep/lock after certain period of time. Your tests will require desktop for UI manipulations.
If you done everything right you should be able to see your build agent active in TeamCity's "Agents" menu.
You can also automate TeamCity agent launch (at selected user's logon):
Automate user's logon. More instructions here
Create task in Task Scheduler which will launch build agent at user's logon with administrative rights (with highest privileges)
Make sure that the user who will logon automatically has all neccessary permissions (run the scripts, perform file operations etc.)
IMPORTANT!
Running UI tests in such way is a potential security hole so make sure that the non-authorized people have no acccess to computer that runs this tests.
Remember that for running your UI test the computer SHOULD NOT be locked or be in sleep mode.
You probably have to make the Teamcity build agent interact with desktop.
Run -> services.msc -> Select TeamCity Build agent and right click -> Properties -> Log On tab -> Check "Allow service to interact with desktop"
Edit:
If that doesn't work, stop the agent service, go to Build Agent folder ( c:\teamcity\buildagent\bin ? ) and issue agent.bat start and then trigger the tests.
There is recommendation to run the UI tests on virtual machines.
Seems as most reliable solution.
This is the error that is thrown by our automated build suite on Windows 2008, while running ICEs (after migrating from WiX 2.0 to WiX 3.0):
LGHT0217: Error executing ICE action 'ICE01'. The most common cause of this kind of ICE failure is an incorrectly registered scripting engine. See http://wix.sourceforge.net/faq.html#Error217 for details and how to solve this problem. The following string format was not expected by the external UI message logger: "The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.". in light.exe(0, 0)
The FAQ is now deleted, however, the text from it said:
In WiX v3, Light automatically runs validation-- Windows Installer Internal Consistency Evaluators (ICEs) --after every successful build. Validation is a great way to catch common authoring errors that can lead to service problems, which is why it’s now run by default. Unfortunately, there’s a common issue that occurs on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 that can cause ICEs to fail. For details on the cause and how to fix it, see Heath Stewart's Blog and Aaron Stebner's WebLog.
Additionally, these are the errors that show up in the event log:
MSIInstaller: Failed to connect to server. Error: 0x80070005
Product: [ProductName] -- Error 1719. The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.
Intuitively:
VBScript and JScript were registered under admin.
Integration service has permissions for the desktop interaction and all the files
Builds succeed, when executed manually on the same machine by another user or even user logged in as integration account (via RDP)
I'm out of ideas so far.
How do I solve this problem while keeping ICE validation?
End of the story:
After fiddling with the permissions of the integration account, DCOM, service activation, etc. without any luck, I finally simply disabled ICE validation in the continuous integration build, while still keeping it in the local build.
To disable ICE validation you can set SuppressValidation to true in the .wixproj file:
<PropertyGroup>
<SuppressValidation>true</SuppressValidation>
</PropertyGroup>
Or pass the -sval command line option to light.exe.
Adding the TFS build controller account to local admin group and restarting the windows service did the job for me.
I found the root cause. I tried everything I found, including custom validator extension similar to one posted in Re: [WiX-users] light.exe failed randomly when running ICEs..
It's not a concurrency issue as suggested in various threads. It's caused by a too large Process Environment Block (PEB).
It turns out Windows Installer can’t handle a process environment block larger than 32 kB. In my environment, due to number of variables set by the build system and their size (for example, PATH variable containing multiple duplicated values), PEB was about 34 kB.
Interestingly, per Environment Variables, Windows XP and 2003 had a hard limit of PEB set to 32 kilobytes. That would probably cause an easy-to-catch build break in an earlier phase of the build. Newer Windows' doesn’t have such limit, but I guess that Windows Installer developers limited their internal environment buffers to 32 kB and fail gracefully when the value is exceeded.
The problem can be easily reproduced:
Create a .bat file which sets environment variables which size exceeds 32 kB. For example, it can be 32 lines of set Variable<number>=<text longer than 1024 characters>
Launch cmd.exe
Execute the batch file you created
From the same cmd.exe window:
Try building the MSI package using WiX with ICE validation on OR
Run smoke.exe to validate your package OR
Simply run msiexec /i Package.msi
All the above commands will end up reporting Error 1719 - Windows Installer could not be accessed.
So, the solution is - review your build scripts and reduce number and size of environment variables so they all fit into 32 kB. You can easily verify the results by running:
set > environment.txt
The goal is to get file environment.txt smaller than ~30 kB.
The correct description (without a solution, except if adding the CruiseControl account into local administrators group can pass as a solution) of the problem:
Quote from Wix 3.5 & Cruise Control gives errorLGHT0217:
ICE validation needs an interactive account or administrator privileges to be
happy. See for example WiX Projects vs. TFS 2010 Team Build (2009-11-14) or Re: [WiX-users] Help with building patch (2009-11-20).
imagi is totally right! I could not believe this is the true answer. Supressing validation and making TFS user Administrator are not good solutions. Plus I could not find NT\Authority to add it to Administrators group and was totally stuck in this.
I got the same error on Windows Server 2012 Datacenter as Build Agent.
To solve the problem :
List item
Go to Environment Variables on the build agent machine
Create two System Variables
"PF86" which is equal to "C:\Program Files (x86)"
"PF" which is equal to "C:\Program Files"
They are so short because I want to save characters.I made them without the final backslash because TEMP, TMP and others were made so and I decided to stick to MS standard for these variables.
Edit PATH variable by substituting every "C:\Program Files (x86)" with %PF86% and every "C:\Program Files" with %PF%
Close and build and enjoy!
It worked for me. :)
UPDATE
I found a better solution : Rapid Environment Editor will do all this and even more for you. Automatically.
I faced the same problem and did not like to suppress ICE validation. My setup: I used my own computer as a build agent on Visual Studio Online (VSO). My solution was to change the account used to run the service on my machine. Instead of using Network Service or Local Service I simply made the service log on with my own account which had all the necessary rights.
From http://wix.sourceforge.net/faq.html#Error217:
In WiX v3, Light automatically runs validation--
Windows Installer Internal Consistency Evaluators (ICEs)
--after every successful build. Validation is a
great way to catch common authoring errors that can lead to service problems,
which is why it’s now run by default. Unfortunately, there’s a common issue
that occurs on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 that can cause ICEs to
fail. For details on the cause and how to fix it, see
Heath Stewart's Blog
and
Aaron Stebner's WebLog.
I was getting same ICE error, but the problem turned to be corrupted Windows Installer Service.
This solution worked for me:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315353
Log on to your computer as an administrator.
Click Start, and then click Run.
In the Open box, type cmd, and then click OK.
At the command prompt, type msiexec.exe /unregister, and then press ENTER.
Type msiexec /regserver, and then press ENTER.
Restart Windows
Also, verify that the SYSTEM account has full control access permissions to the
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT hive in the Windows registry. In some cases, you may also have to add Administrator accounts.
I have some suggestions.
Try updating the Microsoft Installer version on the build server
Make sure you use the newest release of WiX 3.0, since it's 3.0 release stable now.
If all else fails, try running the build service under a specific build user who you can fiddle with permissions for...
I got this error from my Azure build agent running on-premises.
My solution was to upgrade its user account from "Network Service" to "Local system account".
Go to your build machine and restart the Windows Installer service
None of the above suggestions worked for me, for me the anti-virus (mcafee) came into the picture and looks like it updated the vbscript.dll registry entry to a wrong DLL location. These are the things to keep in mind:
Some of the WiX ICE validations are implemented using VBSCRIPT.
So while compiling the MSI, the build server would need access to the c:\windows\system32\vbscript.dll.
Chances are that somehow the user that runs your build lost access to this DLL.
As mentioned in the above answers do look for the admin access/registry access and make sure your user has it.
Here are the steps that I took to fix the issue:
Open cmd (run as admin) on the build agent machine.
Run RegEdit
Select the root, then click ctrl + f and Search for the following registry entry : {B54F3741-5B07-11cf-A4B0-00AA004A55E8}
Look for the InprocServer32\Default Key
On my build agent, the path was replaced with a mcafee DLL location. I updated the path back to c:\windows\system32\vbscript.dll
Editing the registry entry was not easy, as it was a protected registry entry. I used the below link to get access permissions changed before I could edit the property: Edit protected registry entry
Once I updated the path, everything started working as usual.
My solution is similar to Vladimir's one. My CI user was admin of the computer.
But the following steps were mandatory to allow my jenkins build to succeed:
log in as CI user using rdp
open a dos command prompt
execute: %windir%\system32\msiexec.exe /unregister
execute: %windir%\system32\msiexec.exe /regserver
then i got a successfull job