Can you tell our readers a bit about Visual Approvals?
Visual Approvals is dedicated to empowering Australia’s building surveying businesses by simplifying the intricate building approval processes. Our mission is to reduce risk and foster growth within building certification businesses. We envision our software setting new standards of excellence in the building certification and regulatory sectors.
Streamlining approvals through extensive experience
Since our founding in 1998, we have deeply engaged with the building certification industry. From the outset, we have collaborated closely with essential stakeholders like building certifiers, engineers, architects, and town planners. This hands-on experience provided us with invaluable insights and feedback about the building approval process’s complexities and requirements. Leveraging this knowledge, we developed our software to streamline business processes and enhance efficiency.
Simplifying approvals with robust software
The complexity of the building certification process meant our goals were not achieved overnight. However, through continuous industry collaboration and rigorous software testing and refinement, we have succeeded. Today, we proudly offer a comprehensive building approval software solution that streamlines the entire process and equips certifiers with the tools they need to excel.
Committed to meeting industry needs
Our commitment to meeting the evolving demands of the building certification industry drives us to continually engage with industry stakeholders and seek improvement opportunities. Visual Approvals is dedicated to adapting to the changing building approval requirements and regulatory standards across all states and territories, delivering significant efficiency savings to the building and construction industries.
Why does Visual Approvals use AlwaysUp?
Many of our customers rely on Dropbox or OneDrive for their documentation, requiring them to be always operational. AlwaysUp ensures that the tools run continuously, regardless of whether the user is logged in, as long as their machine is turned on.
When a new or existing client opts to use Dropbox or OneDrive for their documentation, we install AlwaysUp to support this requirement.
We’ve been using AlwaysUp for the past ten years, and it has consistently met our needs.
What business problem does AlwaysUp solve?
We needed a solution to ensure that Dropbox or OneDrive were always running, facilitating seamless document transfer between the cloud and the customer’s PC.
To explain a bit more, understand that our customers are constantly on the road performing building inspections. Each person uses an iPad to complete necessary documents which are then copied to the cloud (OneDrive or Dropbox) and shared with the main office. It’s important that those documents are uploaded quickly and seamlessly.
By running AlwaysUp on the PC in the main office, we can rest assured that the documents edited on the iPad will make their way to the customer’s office, even if no one is in the office (or logged on to their main computer).
How many installations do you manage?
We’ve purchased an Unlimited OEM license for AlwaysUp, allowing us to install as many as needed to support our growing client base.
Did you evaluate any competitors of AlwaysUp?
Not really. We started out thinking we’d have to develop our own solution but we decided against that once we found AlwaysUp. We didn’t feel the need to look elsewhere because:
#1: AlwaysUp provides exactly what we need
We were able to install OneDrive and Dropbox in AlwaysUp in minutes. Any software we developed would be doing exactly the same thing — but then we would be responsible for maintaining it ourselves, and that would distract us from our main work.
#2: We received excellent product support
The team at Core Technologies is very attentive. They get back to us promptly whenever we have a question or hit a problem. For example, when Dropbox stopped working as a Windows Service for some of our customers a few years ago, Core Technologies was able to resolve the problems in a few weeks.
What are your favorite features of the software?
The most appreciated feature is its reliability. AlwaysUp keeps Dropbox running smoothly and notifies us if the system stops. While it likely offers more functionalities than we use, the features we rely on are stable and dependable.
Any other comments?
Working with Core Technologies has been a great experience. Their support team is responsive and helpful. We would highly recommend AlwaysUp to others needing a solution for continuous program operation.
In particular, AlwaysUp has been crucial for our iPad app, which uploads and downloads documents to and from Dropbox or OneDrive. The continuous availability ensured by AlwaysUp allows our clients to sync documents at any time, day or night, enhancing the overall solution we provide.
Are you having a problem running OneDrive as a service with AlwaysUp? Perhaps OneDrive.exe is running but your files aren’t being synchronized with the cloud?
We know that troubleshooting OneDrive in the isolated Session 0 can be difficult. Even if OneDrive is trying to tell you what’s wrong by displaying a helpful error message, you can’t see it.
OneDrive writes encrypted log files for “internal” use
On our quest to provide excellent support for running OneDrive 24/7, we were happy to discover that OneDrive systematically writes log files describing what it’s doing. And those files are quite detailed!
But before you start to celebrate like we did, the reality is that the logs are in a proprietary, undocumented binary format. They’re intended for Microsoft engineers — not mere mortals like you and me.
Fortunately though, that’s not the end of the story.
We can decode OneDrive’s encrypted log files
Even though OneDrive’s log files are encrypted, Yogesh Khatri’s OneDrive ODL reader can parse them. That free python script will run through a log file and produce a readable CSV file.
Yet even after decoding them, the log entries remain cryptic and difficult to understand. As we mentioned before, that’s because the contents are meant to be analyzed by the software engineers who support OneDrive.
For example, here’s what a decoded log file looks like:
As you can see, the lines aren’t particularly revealing!
In any case, we’ve found that the decoded logs can sometimes provide interesting clues that lead us in the right direction. They’re better than nothing, which is why we encourage you to send them to us for analysis.
How to send us your OneDrive log files
Basically, you’ll zip your OneDrive log folder and email it to us.
To do so, step by step:
Open File Explorer
Navigate to the folder where OneDrive stores its logs. It’ll probably be
On the other hand, if you’re running OneDrive with your personal account, you’ll have a subfolder named Personal, as pictured here:
Copy your subfolder (Business1 or Personal) to a temporary location. We don’t want to disturb OneDrive.
In the copied folder, remove all files with the .odlsent, .odlgz or .loggz extensions last modified more than 24 hours ago. There may be quite a few, going back days or weeks.
Once you’ve deleted those older files, you’ll be left with the recent activity and a few supporting files. For instance, we had 24 files on our machine after cleaning up:
Zip (compress) the folder. Afterwards, you can delete the folder.
Email the zip file to our support team (at support@CoreTechnologies.com). We recommend including your OneDrive diagnostics in the email, to tell us how OneDrive is configured on your computer.
That’s it. We’ll do our best to analyze your OneDrive log files and get back to you soon. Wish us luck! 🍀🤞
Have you ever been on a cruise or ferry? If so, there’s a good chance that your arrangements were processed by Versonix — an innovative Silicon Valley company supporting the travel industry for over three decades.
Versonix started using AlwaysUp way back in 2012.
Why does Versonix use AlwaysUp?
At Versonix, we’ve developed several proprietary Windows executables and Java programs to support Seaware — our market-leading cruise reservation system that processes 20 million bookings each year. And over time, AlwaysUp has grown to become an integral part of our day-to-day operations.
Most notably, AlwaysUp helps our business achieve the following:
100% uptime for important software
We install all our applications with AlwaysUp, to ensure that they are constantly up and running. The fact is that we can’t tolerate downtime, and we’ve largely eliminated that by using AlwaysUp.
Centralized application management
In the past, it was tricky to manage hundreds of programs serving dozens of environments across multiple servers. Our engineers were constantly fighting with RDP, Task Manager, the NET command and other Windows utilities.
But that’s all changed. By using AlwaysUp web service, we were able to connect our applications to a central, browser-based dashboard. And from there, we can stop, start or restart our any of our applications with a few clicks. It’s a very convenient solution — made possible by AlwaysUp!
What did you use before AlwaysUp?
We tried Microsoft’s free Srvany tool a few years ago. While it worked fine for making one application into a Windows Service, it’s quite impractical when you need to install hundreds. Furthermore, the lack of a GUI was a major shortcoming.
What are your favorite features of the software?
Beyond the basic “keep everything running 24/7” feature, our team relies on:
The Web Service API
By calling the AlwaysUp REST web services API, our middleware can stop, start or restart our applications programmatically. That flexible capability let’s us integrate AlwaysUp into our software development lifecycle, efficiently attending to maintenance tasks, software upgrades and more.
Tags
We tag each of our applications with the customer and environment it serves. We do that because it allows us to manage a set of related applications as a unit — both from AlwaysUp and from our web dashboard.
For example, we can easily stop all the executables supporting the QA environment because they’re tagged with “GRP_QA” in AlwaysUp. Without that grouping, we’d have to stop each application individually — a tedious process.
Any other comments?
Core Technologies has provided excellent support over the years. Whenever we’ve had a problem, you’ve jumped in quickly to resolve the issue. We really appreciate that professional response as we strive to support our own customers too.
We also appreciate the responsiveness of your development team. Even though your typical user isn’t running hundreds of applications like us, you’ve implemented several of our suggestions that make it easier to run the way that we do. Thanks for your help!
Microsoft’s engineers have been very busy in the three years since the last major release of Windows Server.
And as you can see from the list of updates included in Windows Server 2025 preview, the team focused on under-the-hood revisions to core technologies — instead of publishing new apps or pushing out eye-catching bells and whistles.
Here are the improvements that we found most intriguing:
#1: Hotpatching
Operating system patches — which plug security holes and occasionally tweak functionality — can be applied without having to reboot the server. That means you can roll out patches whenever you like, with zero downtime (and without the need to schedule after-hours maintenance windows).
#2: Next-Gen Active Directory (AD)
It’s clear that Microsoft spent significant effort “future-proofing” it’s popular directory service. For example, this new version of AD can address many more objects (the database page size went from 8k to 32k) and it can utilize more than 64 cores. The updates are numerous.
#3: Delegated Managed Service Accounts
Server 2025 introduces the new delegated Managed Service Account (dMSA). Unlike a conventional account, where you manage password complexity and lifecycle, Active Directory administers the credentials for a dMSA. Furthermore, you can restrict a dMSA to specific devices and contexts, which is ideal for protecting non-interactive use-cases.
If you’d like to find out more, check out this 30 minute video from the 2024 Windows Summit that highlights the technical upgrades in the new operating system:
Any changes to Windows Services?
Other than the option to use the new delegated Managed Service Account, Microsoft hasn’t documented any impacts to Windows Services in Server 2025.
In fact, everything looked pretty much the same as we played with the various tools.
But then, it wasn’t a surprise because that basic management tool hasn’t been updated in over a decade!
Is AlwaysUp Compatible with Server 2025?
Yes, AlwaysUp runs flawlessly on Windows Server 2025.
We installed a bunch of applications — including as Dropbox, OneDrive and Java — as services and let each one run continuously for at least a week. And after thoroughly examining the event viewer and our own debug logs, we didn’t detect any problems at all.
Does Service Protector work on Server 2025?
Like AlwaysUp, Service Protector ran without any hiccups.
To test, we employed our “bad service simulator” — a deliberately diabolical piece of code that randomly uses too much memory, hangs, or crashes. Service Protector was able to handle all eventualities, proving that Microsoft’s Windows Services API remains robust on Server 2025.
Afterwards, we focused on validating services that our customers run. Service Protector was able to babysit FileBeat, MongoDB and MariaDB as well as it does on Windows Server 2019 and 2022:
How about your free utilities? Any quirks on 2025?
And our most popular non-service software — MyFolders and http-ping — passed inspection as well.
Preparing for the official release (24H2)
Microsoft expects to make Windows Server 2025 available to all customers in the second half of 2024. Until then, we’ll continue to test drive the preview releases, to ensure that all our software is ready to go on day one. 🙂
After months of coding and testing, we released Service Protector 10.0 on May 10. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new in this release:
Restart your Windows Service if a specific drive letter isn’t available
Does your Windows Service use files or folders on a mapped drive?
Or is your service responsible for mapping a drive letter?
If so, you should use Service Protector’s newest sanity check to detect when the drive mapping fails and promptly restart your service.
With Service Protector watching the drive, you won’t need to rely on calls from your customers to alert you of a problem. And you won’t have to dial in at all hours to fix your failing software.
How to monitor a drive mapping
The “check drive mapping” sanity check is very easy to use. For example, here’s how to verify that the P drive is always available:
Edit your service in Service Protector (or add a new one if you like).
Switch to the Monitor tab.
Check the Whenever it fails a periodic sanity check box and click the Set button to the right:
In the window that comes up, select the Check that a drive is mapped entry and click Next to proceed:
Select the “P” drive:
After clicking the Next button, specify how often Service Protector should check that the P drive is available. Every 5 minutes is probably good enough:
Click Next to continue.
Finally, confirm that the sanity check is configured as you expect. Click Add if you’re satisfied:
Save your changes in Service Protector.
And that’s it. With the sanity check keeping watch, Service Protector will automatically recycle your service if your drive mapping fails.
Set a timeout when checking that a HTTP/HTTPS web server is responding
The web server sanity check now accepts a timeout parameter, to indicate how long to wait for a response from the server before failing the request.
Why the change?
Previous versions of Service Protector waited indefinitely for the web server to answer. However, that caused a problem for a customer monitoring Microsoft’s IIS service.
For some unknown reason, his IIS would occasionally stop serving pages. When that happened, his users accessing the site from a browser would see an error indicating that the site was inaccessible. He configured Service Protector to check his site every couple of minutes and restart IIS if the URL stopped responding.
But it didn’t work! Service Protector reported that the service was functioning fine — even when the browser said otherwise.
After investigating, we figured out what was going wrong. IIS wasn’t refusing to serve web pages. It was returning the data just fine — but it was taking over 5 minutes to do so!
When IIS takes so long to respond, the browser gives up waiting and displays an error. That’s what the users were seeing.
But Service Protector would wait patiently for IIS to respond and declare the lengthy process a success. That’s why it wasn’t restarting IIS.
We introduced the new timeout option to fix the mismatch. You set the value (in seconds) right below the URL:
Once the customer configured a 30-second timeout, Service Protector was able to detect the sluggishness and promptly restarted IIS. Problem solved!
Easily test if your Windows Service has open TCP/IP network connections
You couldn’t easily test the TCP/IP network connections sanity check in previous version of Service Protector. Because of that, the Check now button was disabled.
Service Protector 10 activates the feature, allowing you to verify the selected service on demand:
You may find that helpful as you decide how to deploy the sanity check in your environment.
For example, here are the results of checking the Print Spooler Windows Service on our machine:
You can see that the Spooler service has an open listening TCP/IP connection, as expected.
Other fixes & improvements
To help with troubleshooting, Service Protector now shows the HTTP response and/or headers when manually running the web server sanity check. That way you’ll know exactly what is coming back from your web server, and you can configure the sanity check accordingly.
For example, here’s what Service Protector returned when checking our company website:
You can copy the text to the clipboard and make sure that the response is exactly as you expect.
Based on feedback from our customers, the web server sanity check now treats HTTP status codes 1XX and 3XX as success. Only status codes 4XX and 5XX are treated as errors that will restart your service.
We enlarged the text and icons on the taskbar tray menu, to improve readability:
As usual, please review the release notes for the full list of features, fixes and improvements included in Service Protector version 10.0.
Upgrading to Service Protector 10
If you purchased Service Protector version 9 (after April 2023), you can upgrade to version 10 for free. Simply download and install over your existing installation to preserve your existing services and all settings. That way, your registration code will continue to work.
If you bought Service Protector 8 or earlier (before April 2023), you will need to upgrade to use version 10.
(888) 881-CORE
Visual Approvals is dedicated to empowering Australia’s building surveying businesses by simplifying the intricate building approval processes. Our mission is to reduce risk and foster growth within building certification businesses. We envision our software setting new standards of excellence in the building certification and regulatory sectors.
