windows process waiting for lsass - windows-7

My company is using clearcase on a linux server and the development environment under linux and windows 7.
The windows 7 machines are for snapshot only.
the problem we have is windows only.
For each clearcase command under windows, there is a lot of latency.
We noticed the process lsass.exe when we do ressource monitor/analyze wait chain of cleartool process.
The wait of cleartool on lsass cuase a latency going from 50 sec to 1 minute
The problem does not occur for all users and not all the time.
when the problem does not occur the cleartool process has no process on analyze wait chain.
We have clearcase 8 set on the server and clients with version 7 or 8 .
We are pretty sure it is not a clearcase problem.
I would like some information about lsass and see what could cause the wait on lsass.exe

lsass is the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service, is a process in Microsoft Windows operating systems that is responsible for enforcing the security policy on the system.
I have seen issues in the pass when an Anti-Virus was analyzing ClearCase views.
Try and deactivate as many process/service as possible in order to see if cleartool commands still experience this kind of latency.

ClearCase makes a LOT of calls to your domain controller(s). I have seen some "interesting" performance issues if the communication is sporadically or completely interrupted.
Can you explain where all the major players are in relation to one another? Including, but not limited to:
Windows domains. If there are multiple Windows domains, are they all AD domains in the same forest?
Domain controllers.
Clients.
VOB/View servers.
License servers? Type of licenses served (Classic Atria/Classic Flexnet/Tokens)
Are there multiple license servers in use? (if using FlexNet/Tokens)
A key heads-up is that there were some issues a couple of years back with the permissions on ...\ClearCase\var\cache on Windows. It could cause some pretty serious performance issues if users don't have the rights to create files and write to them here.
You may also want to take a network trace of one of these updates. If you see anything that flat doesn't belong (NetBIOS name broadcasts for your DOMAIN name would be one, as this is a last resort to get a DC address), you may need to do some investigation...

Related

Random 1104 Error Reading File Errors in Multiple VFP Applications

We have multiple applications developed in Visual Foxpro 8.0 running in a data center on Windows 2008 R2 on VMware. We also have a Citrix farm on the same network where users run yet another VFP 8.0 application in Citrix sessions. All applications share the same set of data tables located on a file server (also Windows 2008 R2 VM). Virtual hosts are connected by 10Gb LAN (managed switch).
Since mid-July we started seeing random 1104 "Error reading file..." errors on multiple different applications on multiple servers. All of them reference different files on the file server.
The problem started mid-July and it frequency gradually increased. Earlier it was most frequent in the afternoons by 3 pm, now it happens from early morning till late afternoon. It affects EDI servers (these run batch jobs in unattended mode) and Citrix servers and a variety of applications. It occurs when a VFP application (any of them) tries to open a database container file or individual tables most often with USE command but some times executing a SQL Select statement, or when loading a VFP form that opens tables in DataEnvironment
We caught a moment when the same exact error happened on two different servers running different applications at the same exact moment (up to a second). We also saw two different applications running on the same computer erroring out at the same moment.
We replaced the file server with a new virtual machine with no relief (we since changed it back to the old file server ).
We disabled the antivirus.
We updated VMware on all hosts to the latest version.
Sysinternals Process Monitor displays "INVALID_NETWORK_RESPONSE" event when the error occurs.
We captured traffic on both the server side and client side when the error occurred and had it analyzed by a network analysis specialist. He observed a peculiar pattern, where client OS starts retrieving the file in question from the file server AFTER VFP application had thrown an error. It seems that VFP application requests a file from OS, then it either gets an abnormal response or just times out and only after that the OS sends packets requesting the file. Again, this happens sporadically.
OpLocks and SMB2 have been disabled on all computers both on the server and client side of the equation for many years and everything was running smoothly until now...
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
My first piece of advice would be to re-enable OpLocks and SMB2. There is no reason to mess with either of those items as things stand today and you are losing a huge amount of performance running at SMB1 level.
In my experience these issues have almost always been caused by one of the following.
Antivirus/antimalware software.
Replication or online backup software like MozyPro.
The Windows Search indexing service.
You should consider installing the Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Hotfix Rollup if you haven't already.
That problem mostly related by SMB2!
Some Antivirus Software!
Windows updates! If you use VFP apps by DBF/DBC file. Do not update your system/OS. That is my personal suggestion. Windows Server 2012+ or Windows 10+ prorbably would big problems at near future.
And the point high probably is:
What is your I/O request per secs? if your IO request bigger than 1000~2000 per secs for a dbf file that is a bottle neck; and your storage device is HDD -> you need to switch/update your HDD to SSD. I suggest m.2 pro series SSD.

Can Window OS handle multiple user same time as unix

As we know UNIX is a computer Operating System which is capable of handling activities from multiple users at the same time. My question is that can windows have same capability? If 'yes' then 'how'?
That depends upon your definition of "multiple users".
Processes can (and do) run under multiple user accounts all the time on all modern Windows systems (in this definition, I'm excluding the 95/98/ME line). This has been the case since at least NT 4.
Running multiple interactive user GUI sessions simultaneously, however, is restricted to specific editions of Windows (Server, Terminal Services, etc.). It's not so much a technical limitation as it is a licensing limitation. I'm unaware of limitations on the number of concurrent remote PSSessions supported by Windows (licensing- or technical-based).
Yes. Login using "user1". Run app with admin rights: it runs in "administrator" user group at a same time.

Windows 8 custom imagining for multiple clients -help please?

If anyone can help us I would be very grateful!
Every week we have multiple pc's to distribute to new clients. The machines have to be heavily customised with quite a few specifics:
Removal of most extra "spam" apps - Dell, Asus, Acer add icons we don't want.
Change desktop background
Add 2 specific user accounts, one of which is named according to machine name.
Set 2 specific passwords on the new accounts - site specific
Set Custom icons for each login
The machines are never setup for a domain, so Active Directory technologies can't be easily applied.
The volume and budget is such that the machines are not usually business class devices and we are not setup for any of the technologies used by much larger IT companies like group policy driven MSI updates etc.
Our current process is Donkey powered. On windows 7, deploying a new machine, fully installed with our software will take up to an hour if SQL Server is put on it or 55 mins if not. This is a totally manual endeavour that I'm itching to reform. As the machine make/model changes month on month, I can't rely on what will be installed.
I've looked at Ghost, but it won't work as each machine has it's own specific license key-rather than volumne license.
This process has been bugging me for a long time but it's not been my own department to sort out; however, having worked in schools where I could deploy software packages en masse, I can't believe my colleagues when they say this is the only way to do this job.
Can anyone help? We've done the google dance quite a lot with Windows 7 to solve this and now with Windows 8 but nothing quite fits what we do.
If this is NOT the place for this question, apologies-I did look for a Stack site thats more OS specific but didn't see one! :).
Thanks for any advice offered!
This is not an easy task. I can only give you a high level overview.
Look for the Microsoft tool SYSPREP - with it you can reset a machine you have previously installed with all the software and drivers you require to a state where it boots running a "mini-setup" including driver discovery.
Example:
Sysprep /oobe /generalize /shutdown
The programs remain installed. Shutdown the PC after sysprep ran and take an image using Ghost or any other imaging tool of your choice.
Note:
All essential hardware drivers such as chipset, harddisk, cpu etc. for the target hardware need to be registered using PNPUTIL before you are using SYSPREP, otherwise the prepared and applied image boots into a bluescreen on the target PC. Registering more drivers than you need does not harm as Windows detects the hardware and only installs the drivers it needs.
Simply put all driver packages in C:\drivers, then run the following command in a command window to register them for plug and play (note that using -a -i installs them, but here you need just -a, which advertises them). It will run recursively through all directories where *.inf files are contained:
for /f "tokens=*" %i in ('dir /b /s "C:\drivers\*.inf"') do pnputil -a %i
Hint: If you put this command in a batch file, you need to use %%i instead of %i.
You have to activate windows after the "mini-setup" ran if the firmware does not contain a windows key installed by the vendor. Regarding Windows activation, I found at least some information, however not in too much detail here.
This is how hardware vendors are preparing their PCs.
You can find a lot of information about it at Microsofts TechNet sites,
check this out: Deliver and deploy Windows 8
I hope this helps.

Is it possible to 'dump' a running process and restore/continue it on another PC?

We have a problem at a customer which is not reproducible (some data is shown incorrectly). The customer itself has the problem several times per day, but we can't reproduce the problem in house.
We could use remote debugging to investigate the running process once the customer has the problem, but this requires a developer PC to connect to the customer PC via lots of VPN software. In practice, this is almost impossible since the customer does not want us to connect directly to the server running the application (often there is also a Remote Desktop or Citrix system involved).
I know you can make a MiniDump of a running process to investigate it in a debugger, but then you cannot continue the process to see what's is really going on.
Is there a possiblity to make a dump of the process, copy the dump to the developers PC, and continue the process on the developers PC?
Application is a native unmanaged C++ application.
Of course, all logic related to database connections, network connections, files, ... would be unavailable, but in this case I am mainly interested in the internal logic.
If this is not possible, is this generally possible using a virtual machine instead?

Network problem, suggestions sought

The LAN which has about a half dozen windows xp professional pcs and one windows 7 professional pc.
A jet/access '97 database file is acting as the database.
The method of acccess is via dao (DAO350.dll) and the front end app is written in vb6.
When an instance is created it immediately opens a global database object which it keeps open for the duration of its lifetime.
The windows 7 machine was acting as the fileserver for the last few months without any glitches.
Within the last week what's happened is that instances of the app will work for a while (say 30 mins) on the xp machines and then will fail on database operations, reporting connection errors (eg disk or network error or unable to find such and such a table.
Instances on the windows 7 machine work normally.
Moving the database file to one of the xp machines has the effect that the app works fine on ALL the xp machines but the error occurs on the windows 7 machine instead.
Just before the problem became apparent a newer version of the app was installed.
Uninstalling and installing the previous version did not solve the problem.
No other network changes that I know of were made although I am not entirely sure about this as the hardware guy did apparently visit about the same time the problems arose, perhaps even to do something concerning online backing up of data. (There is data storage on more than one computer) Apparently he did not go near the win 7 machine.
Finally I know not very much about networks so please forgive me if the information I provide here is superfluous or deficient.
I have tried turning off antivirus on the win 7 machine, restarting etc but nothing seems to work.
It is planned to move our database from jet to sql server express in the future.
I need some suggestions as to the possible causes of this so that I can investigate it further. Any suggestions would be gretly appreciated
UPDATE 08/02/2011
The issue has been resolved by the hardware guy who visited the client today. The problem was that on this particular LAN the IP addresses were allocated dynamically except for the Win 7 machine which had a static IP address.
The static address happened to lie within the range from which the dynamic addresses were being selected. This wasn't a problem until last week when a dynamic address was generated that matched the static one and gave rise to the problems I described above.
Thanks to everyone for their input and thanks for not closing the question.
Having smart knowledgeable people to call on is a great help when you're under pressure from an unhappy customer and the gaps in your own knowledge mean that you can't confidently state that your software is definitely not to blame.
I'd try:
Validate that same DAO and ODBC-drivers is used on both xp- and vista machines.
Is LAN single broadcast domain? If not, rewire. (If routers required make
sure WINS is working)
Upgrade to ms-sql. It could be just a day of well worth work, ;-)
regards,
//t

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