BatchPatch Service stuck "starting" after successful installation

[jtupeck]

Thank you so much, Doug. I will keep trying to figure out how we can get this working as intended. My Security Team log guru istn in today, or I think he would be able to turn on some detailed logging and probably be able to help me out. What started as a quick “Oh I can totally get this swapped over to a service account today” project, has turned into anything but. Thanks for all the help!

-Jason

[jtupeck]

Added note: I am successfully running OTHER services on this server with the service account now. I was hoping it would give me an error when I attempted to run something else, but it did not. This appears to be specifically related to BatchPatch.

[jtupeck]

Update:

Its working. I have no clue what changed, to make it work, because my recent changes had no immediate effects. Here is the most recent list of things I have changed:

Moved the BatchPatch.exe to c:program files (x86) and am using shortcuts to access the program, rather than running from the desktop.

DNS – Changed primary and secondary DNS entries on the NIC to point direct to our AD controllers, rather than through our F5 load balanced implementation that has been in place for over a year.

Enabled WINS – we have been removing WINS from servers for quite some time, so I decided to just try it to see if it made any difference. I added the WINS entries that we have traditionally used. It made no difference, even after a reboot, etc.

Then, while logged in with the service account, I decided to open the software with MY server admin account. It opened and the service showed as running. So, I went to my working server admin account user profile and opened the software as the LOCAL ADMIN user and run the service install. This also worked, where previously it did not, even while logged in as the local administrator. Once this service was running, I rebooted and logged back in with the service account. The install and setup worked!

I have now since changed DNS back to our standard config and it is still working. I will leave this for a while, do a few reboots in the meantime and see if it continues to run as expected. Then I will disable WINS again and see if that has any adverse affect as well.

I will update this with my findings. Likely sometime Monday.

Thank you for your help today.

[doug]

Wow! So weird. I’m really glad you got it working even though it’s not yet clear what the specific fix was. Please do report back what you discover. Thanks again!

[doug]

In some additional testing that I did I found that if you run BatchPatch.exe from inside BatchPatch.zip it causes problems. What I mean is if you do *not* first extract the BatchPatch.exe from the .zip file and if you instead try to launch BatchPatch.exe directly from inside the .zip file, this causes Windows to create a temp copy of the BatchPatch.exe, and if you then install the service from this temp running copy of BP it causes the service to get stuck “starting.” The reason seems to be related to how permissions are getting applied when BP installs the service. So, if you are having the service stuck “starting” then uninstall it and delete the entire service installation directory. Then reboot and make sure that there is no BatchPatch Service showing in the services console (start > run > services.msc). Then go ahead and make sure to extract your BatchPatch.exe file to some location on the computer such as your desktop or wherever. Then from there launch it and install the service.

-Doug

[AdamC]

Hi,

I’m experiencing the same issue, I have batchpatch.exe unzipped and I have tried installing the service in a number of different directories with batchpatch itself running from a number of different locations and get the same issue. We’re running on Server 2016.

I’ve not found any associated errors in the event log or any sign as to why this is failing to start successfully.

We only have a one user license and the software is running as the domain admin which has logon as a service rights.

[doug]

Since the only time that we have ever been able to reproduce this behavior it has been due to permissions, I think that’s still the most likely reason for what is happening. What’s not clear is why you experience it (and a few others have) while 99% of users never encounter this and why we do not encounter it in our lab. That said, I’d like you to please try the following:

1. Uninstall the service.

2. Close all instances of BatchPatch and then see if you can re-apply permissions to the directory that contains the batchpatch.exe. Essentially the goal here would be to give all of the possible permissions to the directory and the batchpatch.exe for whichever account you are using. Then after that, install the service again and see what happens.

3. If after installing the service you still encounter the same issue, go to the service installation directory where you will find BatchPatchService.exe and BatchPatchServiceInstance.exe. Once again please apply all possible permissions to that entire directory and the files it contains for the account you are using. Let me know how it goes.

What I can tell you is that if you take a standard build of Windows without doing anything to it, the service works just fine. So when this issue occurs it is due to something about the way the environment is configured. Most likely it is related to permissions/security in some way.

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