We’re trialing AlwaysUp to run Dropbox as a Windows Service without anyone logged on. But when I use AlwaysUp, I cannot see the Dropbox tray icon. How do I know that it’s working?
— Wendy
Hi Wendy.
Yes, verifying that Dropbox is functioning is more difficult when you can’t see and interact with it!
Here are the steps you should follow to prove that the popular file hosting software is working properly in the background as a Windows Service:
Test #1: Is Dropbox running?
First, make sure that the Dropbox.exe process is running. If Dropbox.exe isn’t active, it definitely won’t be able to copy your files!
If necessary, click More details to reveal additional information:
Switch to the Details tab and look for the Dropbox.exe process(es) in the list. We found a few on our system:
If you don’t find any instances of the executable in Task Manager, it means that Dropbox isn’t running. Since you’re using AlwaysUp, check for errors — by selecting Report Activity from the Application menu — and see if you can figure out why the service is failing to start.
Note that when Dropbox is running properly, you should find 3 copies of the executable in Task Manager. That is completely normal — it’s just how the file synchronization software works.
Test #2: When you add a file online, is it copied down to your PC?
Now that you know that Dropbox is running, let’s check if it’s copying files from cloud storage to your local computer. Please follow these steps:
Upload a new file to your account. A small text or PDF file should be fine.
For example, here you can see that we have uploaded a file named “AlwaysUpWebServiceAPI.pdf”:
Wait up to 5 minutes. It can take a while for Dropbox to recognize and copy the new file — especially if you have many files or folders in your account.
On your PC, check for the file in the Dropbox folder. This is usually:
C:\Users\<YOUR-USERNAME>\Dropbox
As you can see here, our file was copied successfully:
Did your file appear? If so, you are good!
If not, wait for a few more minutes. Perhaps Dropbox is copying other files and just hasn’t gotten to yours yet.
However, if you don’t see the new file on your PC after 10 minutes, it’s very likely that Dropbox isn’t functioning properly.
Test #3: When you create a file on your PC, is it copied up to the Dropbox cloud?
Whenever you create a new file, Dropbox should quickly copy it to your account online. Please perform these steps to make sure that’s happening:
On your PC, open the local Dropbox folder in File Explorer. Once again, this is probably:
C:\Users\<YOUR-USERNAME>\Dropbox
Create a new text file in the folder. Give it a unique, recognizable name.
For example, we called ours “Dropbox-test-03-21-2021.txt”:
Wait a up to 5 minutes. It can take a while for Dropbox to recognize and copy the new file — especially if you have lots of files or folders in your account.
Once again, the test was successful on our system. The file appeared as expected:
However, if you don’t see your file, please wait a bit longer. You can confidently declare a failure if the file doesn’t show up after 10 minutes.
Test #4: When you remove a file from your PC, is it removed online?
Local file deletions should be quickly reflected in the cloud. To check on that, please:
Start File Explorer on your PC and navigate to your Dropbox folder.
Delete a file that you don’t need — perhaps the one that you created in test #2.
Note: If you see a confirmation window like this, be sure to check the Don’t ask me this again box before clicking the Delete everywhere button:
If you don’t check that option, the pesky popup may resurface and stall file synchronization. You won’t be there to dismiss it when Dropbox is running invisibly in the background as an unattended service!
Wait for up to 5 minutes. It can take a while for the file synchronization components to recognize the deletion and spring into action.
Go online and confirm that the file has been removed from your cloud storage.
Test #5: When you delete a file from the Dropbox cloud, is it deleted from your PC?
Finally, whenever a file is deleted from your cloud storage, it should soon disappear from your PC’s shared folder. To verify that:
Open your web browser and go to your cloud storage page.
Find a file that you don’t need and delete it from the repository.
For example, we chose to remove the file we created in test #3:
Wait up to 5 minutes for the deletion to propagate to your PC.
Open File Explorer on your computer and confirm that the file has been removed from your local Dropbox folder.
If the file remains after 10 minutes, something is wrong.
Get in touch if any test failed
Did one or more of the tests fail? Please let us know and we’ll be happy to help.
In addition to the results of the 4 tests above, please be sure to send us the information outlined in this article so that we can provide our best support!
UPDATE: Use Cloud Storage Tester to validate Dropbox
The easiest way to check that Dropbox is copying your files to and from the cloud is to use Cloud Storage Tester.
It’s a free, portable utility to check that the Dropbox client application is working properly on your computer.
We use Srvany to run our Java application as a service. It starts fine but when we stop the service our Java application does not close. We have to kill the java.exe process in Task Manager. That’s not supposed to happen, right? Is there a registry setting that we are missing that will shut down our application properly when we stop the service?
Well, maybe not. Let’s examine what Microsoft’s service wrapper does when it receives the most important SCM commands — “start service” and “stop service”.
How Srvany handles the “Start Service” command
When you start your service — from the Services application, NET START, or SC START — the SCM immediately launches a fresh instance of srvany.exe and notifies it of the start request.
In response, Srvany:
Informs the SCM that the service is starting.
Starts the program configured to run as a service. The full command line is read from this registry value:
If Srvany fails to start the application (which will happen if the application/path doesn’t exist), Srvany will:
Inform the SCM that the service has stopped.
Exit, ending the srvany.exe process.
On the other hand, if it successfully launches the application, Srvany will:
Inform the SCM that the service is now running.
Continue to run, listening for subsequent commands from the SCM.
Testing service start with Notepad
To confirm this behavior, we installed a new service (with Instsrv) and configured it to run the Windows Notepad text editor:
We started the service.
With the help of Microsoft’s excellent Process Explorer, here is what the process tree looked like after a few seconds. As expected, there was a srvany.exe process that had spawned a notepad.exe child process:
And Notepad was happily running in the background, on the isolated Session 0 desktop.
How Srvany handles the “Stop Service” command
When you attempt to stop your service — from the Services application, NET STOP, or SC STOP — the SCM immediately notifies the associated Srvany process of the stop request.
In response, Srvany will:
Inform the SCM that the service is stopping.
Close the process/application that it started.
Inform the SCM that the service is stopped.
Exit, ending the srvany.exe process.
When we stopped the Notepad service, Notepad.exe was terminated as expected.
But what happens when running a Java application/service?
Since stopping your Java application didn’t go smoothly, we decided to dig into that specific scenario.
We installed a new service and configured it to launch a Java JAR package:
When we started the service, we saw srvany.exe launch java.exe. No surprises there:
And when we stopped the service, the java.exe process ended and Srvany exited — all good.
So how come it isn’t working for you?
What about a Java application started from a batch file?
After some head scratching, we realized something important. Many of our customers running Java as a service with AlwaysUp don’t run java directly. Instead, they start java via a batch file because it gives them the opportunity to set important environment variables in advance. Could that be an issue?
To answer that question, we created a simple batch file that launched java and installed a new service to run the batch file:
We started the service. Srvany launched the batch file (cmd.exe), which in turn launched Java — all as intended:
However, when tried to stop the service, something unexpected happened. The service stopped and srvany.exe and cmd.exe closed, but java.exe did not exit! The Java process remained running, even after the service had transitioned to the stopped state. It was exactly as you described.
So from these tests, it seems that Srvany will terminate the process it launched (i.e. its direct child process) but will not terminate any descendant processes.
Do you think this is what you are experiencing? If so, please read on for a couple of potential solutions.
Solution #1: Run the Java executable directly from Srvany
Instead of starting Java from a batch file, let Srvany run your Java.exe command line itself. As we have shown above, Srvany is able to terminate Java when it launches it directly.
However, this option may be impractical if your batch file performs lots of setup. But if the batch file focuses on setting environment variables (e.g. CLASSPATH), you can get around that by:
Permanently setting the environment variables in a specific user account, and
Running Java in that account (by specifying the user’s details on the service’s Log On tab).
Solution #2: Install your Java application as a service with AlwaysUp instead of Srvany
Alternatively, if this is a professional setting and a commercial option is acceptable, you can replace Srvany with our AlwaysUp utility.
When you stop a service created by AlwaysUp, all descendant processes are terminated. That is, AlwaysUp will close cmd.exe, java.exe — and any other processes that your Java application spawns. You will never have a situation where your service is stopped but some processes remain alive.
Are you responsible for a temperamental Windows Service? If so, you should definitely check out the latest version of Service Protector — the easiest way to achieve 100% uptime today.
Here’s what’s new in this release:
Email alerts include recent activity
Customers who have configured email alerts will notice that messages now contain the service’s last five events from the Windows Event Logs. The idea is to provide helpful context when something unusual happens, to avoid you having to log on to interrogate Service Protector’s reports.
Here is what an email with the new Recent Activity section looks like:
Delay the initial Sanity Check when detecting service problems
A customized sanity check is an excellent way to extend failure detection and automatically restart a faltering service. With a sanity check, you can probe network connectivity, check for a “stale” output file, and much more — whatever you like!
Service Protector version 7 allows you to delay the first sanity check. This is useful when your service takes a while to get ready — either at boot or after it has been restarted.
The new delay settings appear on the Configure Sanity Check window:
From the release notes, 20H2 doesn’t include significant changes to the Windows Services infrastructure. The update focused mostly on end-user improvements for the Edge browser, task tray notifications and the like.
Nevertheless, our team tested Service Protector 7.0 extensively on the new version of Windows 10. We’re pleased to report that no problems were detected and Service Protector remains fully compatible with all versions of Windows 10.
As usual, please review the release notes for the full list of features, fixes and improvements included in this release.
Upgrading to Service Protector 7
If you purchased Service Protector version 6 (after February 2019) you can upgrade to version 7 for free. Simply download and install “over the top” to preserve your existing services and all settings. Your registration code will continue to work.
My team inherited a cluster of 4 Windows Server 2012 R2 machines running a legacy finance application. At a time only one instance of the application should be up and running as the active/primary instance.
The application is cluster-unaware so we set it up with the Generic Application type. Most days it works fine but about once or twice per month the EXE stops responding and no failover happens. Someone has to log in and kill it to trigger failover, which is just plain silly.
I see that your AlwaysUp may be able to better manage the program. My question is, can your product work to control and maintain the supervision of these instances?
— Andrei
Hi Andrei.
Several of our corporate customers have deployed AlwaysUp in Windows clusters. They tell us that, despite having no specific features that target cluster management, AlwaysUp works very well in that context.
In situations like yours where 100% uptime of a particular application is important, AlwaysUp adds an efficient line of defense — one that complements traditional multi-machine failover. Here’s how that works.
Application resilience: AlwaysUp protects against application failures
AlwaysUp’s job is to ensure that your application is always running. If your application crashes, AlwaysUp will automatically restart it.
But AlwaysUp provides much more than basic crash protection. It can operate proactively, rooting out problematic situations before they metastasize into full blown failures.
For example, you can have AlwaysUp quickly recycle your application if it:
Monopolizes the CPU for too long;
Consumes too much RAM;
Fails to respond properly to network/web requests;
Stops writing to a log file.
In it helps, you can even have AlwaysUp restart your finance program once a week during off-hours — to fend off mysterious lock-ups and other unpleasant instabilities.
Less downtime when your application fails
Most importantly, your system/service will likely experience less downtime when AlwaysUp is the first line of defense. Instead of waiting for the cluster failure to be detected and the switchover to the backup server to occur, your application will quickly bounce back on the active server. That rapid resolution can shave many precious seconds off your recovery time!
System resilience: Clustering protects against catastrophic failures
While AlwaysUp is able to cure many application failures, there are a range of deeper problems that it cannot solve. For example, when:
The machine loses power;
The server’s operating system crashes;
The network experiences an outage;
A critical hardware component (motherboard, hard drive, etc.) malfunctions.
For those dicey situations — where a server has been compromised — your failover cluster setup will save the day.
Configure a “Generic Service” instead of a “Generic Application”
Since you set up a Generic Application resource type to monitor your important program, you should remove that and replace it with a Generic Service that monitors the Windows Service created by AlwaysUp:
That change will enable your cluster to fail over whenever AlwaysUp protection stops — not when your legacy application fails. That is an important distinction.
If your application is named “Legacy Finance App” in AlwaysUp, select the Windows Service called “Legacy Finance App (managed by AlwaysUpService)”. You can find out more about the service created by AlwaysUp on the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.
Posted onJanuary 25, 2021 (Revised April 19, 2022)
Not all Outlook functions work from a Windows Service
Calling Outlook from a Windows Service can be problematic. Even though many operations work fine, Microsoft has issued some pointed advice for customers looking to run any Office application in the background in Session 0:
All current versions of Microsoft Office were designed, tested, and configured to run as end-user products on a client workstation. They assume an interactive desktop and user profile. They do not provide the level of reentrancy or security that is necessary to meet the needs of server-side components that are designed to run unattended.
Microsoft does not currently recommend, and does not support, Automation of Microsoft Office applications from any unattended, non-interactive client application or component (including ASP, ASP.NET, DCOM, and NT Services), because Office may exhibit unstable behavior and/or deadlock when Office is run in this environment.
If you are building a solution that runs in a server-side context, you should try to use components that have been made safe for unattended execution. Or, you should try to find alternatives that allow at least part of the code to run client-side. If you use an Office application from a server-side solution, the application will lack many of the necessary capabilities to run successfully.
Very disappointing!
So instead of calling Outlook, which may be unreliable when run in the context of a service, look to one of these alternative solutions instead:
Solution #1: Have your Windows Service call PowerShell to send basic email
If you don’t want to install any third-party utilities, you can leverage Microsoft’s ubiquitous PowerShell utility to deliver your messages. And to help, we’ve created a simple script that, given eight required parameters, will send an email to any address:
Your email provider will determine the SMTP server and port number you should use. For example, if your provider is Gmail, the SMTP server is “smtp.gmail.com” and the port is 587.
To invoke the script from an application, run the PowerShell executable with the -File option. Specify the full path to the script along with the eight required parameters.
For example, if you’ve saved the script in C:\Utilities and you’re sending via Gmail, your command line will look like this:
powershell.exe -File "C:\Utilities\send-email.ps1" from@coretechnologies.com to@coretechnologies.com "Server Down Alert" "Server 'FileServer1' is down!" smtp.gmail.com 587 from@coretechnologies.com "PWD8581JG$"
Watch out for quotes in the subject and body and escape accordingly!
Solution #2: Use SwithMail to deliver complex messages from your Windows Service
SwithMail is a free, no-nonsense utility that can send very detailed email messages. It supports all the important messaging options, including:
HTML formatting
Multiple attachment files
CC and BCC recipients
“ReplyTo” configuration
After downloading the SwithMail zip file and extracting its contents to a suitable location, double-click SwithMail.exe to reveal the comprehensive command line:
Simply specify the options you need. For example, here is a sample command line that sends the same message as the PowerShell script above:
If you’re having trouble configuring SwithMail, add the /Log parameter and a path to a log file. Check the file for error messages after a failed run.
Solution #3: Update your Windows Service code to send email directly
If you have access to the service’s source code, your best option may be to include code to send email using the SMTP classes built into your programming language.
Here is some sample C# code (error handling omitted for clarity):
// Compose the message.
MailMessage mailMessage = new MailMessage();
mailMessage.From = new MailAddress("from@coretechnologies.com");
mailMessage.To.Add(new MailAddress("to@coretechnologies.com"));
mailMessage.Subject = "Server down";
mailMessage.Body = "Server <b>FileServer1</b> is down!";
mailMessage.BodyFormat = MailFormat.Html;
// Construct the SMTP object that will send the message.
smtpClient = new SmtpClient("smtp.gmail.com", 587);
smtpClient.EnableSsl = true;
smtpClient.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("from@coretechnologies.com", "PWD8581JG$");
// Send the message!
smtpClient.Send(mailMessage);
Get in touch if you need help sending email from your Windows Service
Hopefully one of these three solutions, which don’t involve Outlook, will work from your service. If not — or if you have questions about the methods outlined above — please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team. We’re here to help!
(888) 881-CORE
UPDATE: Use Cloud Storage Tester to validate Dropbox
We use 
