HQ v3.2.3 Crashes on Windows 2003 Server

[BradFelmey]

It will not run at all. Attached is the error log.

[dougm_hyperic]

Hey Brad,

Any errors in the server.log or windows Event Log viewer?

[excowboy]

Hi Brad,

no problems here running HQ Agent 3.2.3 with shipped JRE on W2k3 Server yet.
Does the Agent crash after startup or after a while ?

Mirko

[BradFelmey]

Event Log has the utterly-unhelpful "JVM Shutdown Abnormally: exit code=1"

Running the client results in immediate failure with a popup window containing:

"This application has failed to start because pdh.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix the problem."

Of course, reinstalling does not fix it. 😞

Nothing whatsoever in server.log. It doesn't seem to ever get that far.

I'm sure it's something d0rked with this system, as others are (evidently) successfully running v3.2.3 on Windows 2003 Server. We're just a bit shy about trying again unless and until we know what the issue is, because for all we know it's like our ESX experience - upgrade and lose all monitoring. 😞

[BradFelmey]

I have done a whole lot of testing now with a blizzard of HQ versions, JRE versions, etc.

It appears that on this system SIGAR is not picking up the fact that pdh.dll is present in the %HQ_HOME%\pdk\lib directory, even though it's sitting right there. This is true for any JRE (original, as-shipped, v1.5.0_07 and v1.6.0_05), with any version of HQ 3.1.4 and above.

Placing this pdh.dll file into the %SystemRoot%\system32 (the default dll path for the whole environment) resulted in HQ v3.2.3 happily humming away.

Checking other Windows 2003 Servers with functioning HQ shows that a current version of pdh.dll is present in the %SystemRoot%\system32 directory on all of them. Only this one box was missing the file.

With that said, I took a look at the pdh.dll that's being shipped with the HQ agent, and it's an old one from Windows 2000. Removing it entirely from %HQ_HOME%\pdk\lib doesn't seem to affect the operation of HQ, so perhaps it's no longer necessary to ship it?

[dougm_hyperic]

Hey Brad,

Glad you found the cure, very strange that the system pdh.dll disappeared, it is installed by default as of win2k. Haven't heard of this being an issue before. As for the pdh.dll in pdk/lib, it is only loaded on NT 4.0 systems..yes, there are people still using NT 🙂
From Sigar.java ...
if (SigarLoader.IS_WIN32 &&
System.getProperty("os.version").equals("4.0"))
{
String lib =
loader.findJarPath("pdh.dll") +
File.separator + "pdh.dll";
loader.systemLoad(lib);
}