Leftover PAExec services

[JohnR]

We’ve noticed on a number of servers that BatchPatch appears to have left behind a number of manual services with names in the format of: PAExec-<id#>-<Hostname of BatchPatch computer>

The services are manual and not running at the moment, I’m assuming these are sessions that BatchPatch failed to cleanup when it was done? How do we clean them up and prevent more from being created?

[doug]

BatchPatch is generally used with PsExec, not PAExec. In rare cases if a user is having issues with PsExec he might instead try using PAExec. I’m not sure in your case why you are using PAExec over PsExec, but I assume it’s because you had problems with PsExec functioning properly. That said, I’m not completely surprised to hear that there are PAExec services hanging around on some systems… the reason I’m not surprised is because there is likely something in your environment that was creating an issue for PsExec, and it’s conceivable that the same issue that was causing an issue for PsExec is also preventing PAExec from successfully and completely removing itself from targets where it is being used. BatchPatch does not remove PsExec or PAExec. They remove themselves immediately after they complete execution, but there can be cases where they fail to remove themselves completely/successfully.

You can manually delete a service with the following syntax at the cmd prompt on the server where the service remains:

sc delete ServiceName

[JohnR]

Thanks Doug. I wasn’t part of it’s original setup so I’m not sure why PAExec was used instead of PSExec. We have also recently changed the admin pc that we use for running BP, and I noticed that all of the old service entries names were referencing our old BP pc, so perhaps reinstalling it on the new admin pc resolved what was causing it to break.

[doug]

Makes sense. I would suggest you try to switch back to using PsExec (unless for some reason you aren’t able to get it working). There are two possible ways PAExec would have been in use… Either it would have been renamed to PsExec.exe and just swapped in, or it would have been specified under ‘Tools > Settings > Remove Execution > Use psexec.exe custom filepath’

-Doug

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