Version

All

Date

Friday, 31 Jan 2014

Summary

The Argent Main Engine is unable to communicate with Argent Remote Engines

The status of the Remote Engine is “unknown” on the Argent screens even though bi-directional TCP communication between the Main Engine and Remote Engines is shown to be working

In the log file of the Argent Supervising Engine, multiple restarts of the Engine Service are shown, as well as lines in the log file that look similar to this:

“A process on the machine is already bound to the same fully-qualified address 0.0.0.0:6800.”

(“6800” is the Argent for Compliance port; if a different Argent product is experiencing the issue a different port number will be listed)

Technical Background

This is caused by manually aborting the Argent process from within Task Manager instead of from the Argent GUI or from Windows Service Manager

Windows is notorious for not cleanly ending tasks on such processes

The result is a partially ended process which has not properly closed the Argent process

This process does not release its exclusive control over the related port which prevents the Argent Main Server from sending data to Remote Engines

Resolution

TO PREVENT THIS ISSUE FROM OCCURRING DO NOT MANUALLY ABORT ANY ARGENT PROCESS FROM WITHIN TASK MANAGER

1. Open Task Manager and look for any exact duplicate Argent processes that are running

   For instance two copies of ARGSOFT_COMPLIANCE_MAIN.EXE*32 could be listed in Task Manager

2. Open the corresponding Argent AT product and stop the Supervising Engine Service
3. In Task Manager end the orphan duplicate Argent executable(s)
4. Restart the Argent Supervising Engine Service from the Argent GUI

This nasty Microsoft bug can be easily reproduced by using Microsoft Outlook client:

Start multiple Outlook clients and then using Task Manager to abort some of the instances; generally new instances of Microsoft Outlook will hang