NCPA agent isntall problem

[corkyman]

I deployed NCPA agents on 81 Citrix servers running on Windows 2008. The install was performed using ITMS which our deployment tool used for other install. Everything worked except that both services--listener and passive--were stuck in the Starting state. The only way to recover was to kill the executables in the Windows Task Manager and then start the services annually. They would start and work fine.
I have several observations
1. About 10 servers had both services started so everything worked fine
2. About half dozen servers had one of the services running and another in Starting state
3. The rest had both services in Starting state
4. After killing the executables all services started fine
5. Enough time passed after the deployment to let services start up
6. As a verification step I rebooted one server and after reboot the listener service was in Starting state and the passive service did not start at all. After about 10 minutes both services were running.
7. The same install ran fine earlier on 25 Citrix servers on a different network using a different ITMS system.
8. The manual install on two failing servers produced the same result--services stuck in Starting state so it is not the issue with ITMS.
9. I have not observed any issues with NCPA install before on non-Citrix servers.
10. There were no error messages in any logs created.
11. I can work on one of the 81 servers test the install if needed.

[dwhitfield]

Which version of NCPA are you using? There's a new version coming out...I guess we can publicly say tomorrow: https://github.com/NagiosEnterprises/nc ... HANGES.rst

[corkyman]

I was working with the latest at a time - 1.8.1. Thanks for the heads up and the link. I checked the document and did not see anything directly related to the issue I have. I just received a request to install ncpa on a bunch of other Citrix servers and will do it with a new release. I will need a couple of days to download, set it up and test it. I will let you know.

[dwhitfield]

Are the Citrix versions all the same? Are there any differences in the Windows 2008 versions? What are some of the names of the hosts/services that are working and some of the ones that are failing?

Can you change the log level in ncpa.cfg to loglevel = debug? I'm curious what is it set to now?

Also, can you PM me your Profile? You can download it by going to Admin > System Config > System Profile and click the Download Profile button towards the top. If for whatever reason you *cannot* download the profile, please put the output of View System Info (5.3.4+, Show Profile if older) in the thread (that will at least get us some info).

After you PM the profile, please update this thread. Updating this thread is the only way for it to show back up on our dashboard.

UPDATE: Profile received and shared with techs

[corkyman]

There are no difference in Citrix or Windows versions because all servers are built from one image. During the install the ncpa.cfg file had loglevel=info. I could change the setting and restart but that would work. On manual start the services start up fine. The profile is attached. Unfortunately, I would need to update the install script to use the updated cfg file and play with installation after uninstalling it on a number of servers. I cannot invest this much tie into it. I was hoping you have encountered this problem before. If you feel that without more debugging info you cannot diagnose this problem feel free to close this incident. Otherwise, I will continue working on this problem

[dwhitfield]

You can try running diskperf -y in powershell or cmd *as admin*. Otherwise, it's going to take some digging.

There was an issue in the 1.7.x series that should have been resolved. The only thing I can think of is that you have a lot of processes, or these Citrix servers are particularly under-powered and that's causing the dependent services to start slowly. Of course, then we're back to the issue of why it works on some and not others.