What is the “capture console output” feature? Why would I use it?
When you run your application as a Windows Service with AlwaysUp, your app doesn’t come up on your desktop. Instead, your program runs invisibly in the background — on the isolated Session 0 desktop.
And even though running out of sight is fine for many situations, what if you need to see your application to make sure it’s working properly? That can be tricky — especially for Windows GUI programs.
However, there’s an easy workaround if you’re running a console application.
Simply instruct AlwaysUp to capture all the text that your application prints to the console and save that text to a file. Afterwards, you can read the file to see what your program printed.
For example, here’s the text that AlwaysUp saved when running Rclone as a service:
And capturing text helps our customers running Logstash in the background as well:
When to save console output to a text file
You should consider capturing your application’s console output whenever:
You’re running a text-based application, like a batch file — not a GUI program;
You must preserve all the messages your application reports;
Your application is failing and you’d like to know if it’s printing an error message;
You’re want to keep a close eye on your application, for example when troubleshooting a problem.
How do I capture console output in AlwaysUp?
The “capture output” feature is available on the Extras tab when configuring your application in AlwaysUp.
Simply enable the Capture output to this log file option and enter the full path to the file to record the text:
Furthermore, if your application produces lots of text, you can check the Automatically box and determine what to do when the file gets large.
What are your best tips for capturing text?
Tip #1: Set a maximum size for the text file
The output file may be difficult to work with if it gets huge. To avoid that, you should specify a reasonable limit for the text file.
We recommend capping the file at 20 MB or less. That’s room for a lot of text!
Tip #2: Decide what to do if the file grows too large
If the file reaches its maximum size, AlwaysUp can either:
Trim the file, discarding the oldest 25% of the contents; or
Rollover the file, renaming it to include the current date and starting fresh with an empty file.
Be sure to choose the option that’s most appropriate for your situation. For example, you shouldn’t trim the file if you need to preserve all the entries written to the console.
Tip #3: Avoid locking the file while your application is running
An application that locks the output file will prevent AlwaysUp from adding new text to the file. If that happens, you may miss some of the data that your application has written to the console.
The Local Session Manager is an important Windows Service that establishes a dedicated session/desktop whenever you log in to your computer. It’s involved however you sign on — to the physical console (with the keyboard and mouse) or through a remote connection technology, like RDP.
The service’s display name is Local Session Manager. It runs as LocalSystem inside the service host process, svchost.exe. By default, the service is set to start automatically at boot:
What happens if I stop Local Session Manager?
It’s not easy to stop the LSM service.
In fact, all the service’s operations are disabled and the action buttons are grayed out when you look at LSM in the built-in Services application:
And the SC command confirms that the service won’t accept requests to stop:
Microsoft has really locked-down the Local Session Manager!
First, we found the process identifier (PID) of LSM from the Services tab in Task Manager. It was 960 on our machine:
Next, we switched to the Details tab and located the process with PID 960 in the list. From there, we right-clicked the row and chose End task from the menu.
After confirming that we really wanted to end the svchost process, Windows terminated PID 960:
And the LSM service stopped:
What happened after we stopped the LSM service
At first, there were no visible effects of stopping the Local Session Manager. We weren’t ejected from our RDP session and all our programs continued to operate normally. Everything was fine.
Yet, because of the tight security controls on the LSM service, we couldn’t restart it:
In any case, everything was normal — until we decided to log off. When we signed out of our account, our RDP session hung with a black screen.
Afterwards, we simply couldn’t log in to our computer again. RDP connection windows appeared and quickly vanished without acknowledgement. And when we tried to log in directly on the console, Windows rejected us with a terse, unhelpful error message:
We had to reboot our computer to restore access.
The behavior confirmed that:
LSM is critical in establishing a new login session, either via RDP or from the physical console;
However, once it’s established a session, LSM is not involved in the ongoing operation of that session.
So, in summary, if you stop the Local Session Manager service:
Existing login sessions will be OK but no one else can log in to your computer.
You may have trouble logging off your computer.
You’ll have to reboot your computer to restart the service. Furthermore, holding down the power button (to kill the power to your PC) may be the only way to reboot.
Is it OK to disable the LSM service?
No — not if you want to sign on to your computer. As described above, you simply can’t log in when LSM isn’t running.
Indeed, Microsoft cautions against disabling Local Session Manager:
Stopping or disabling this service will result in system instability.
You should heed that advice. It’s best to keep the LSM service enabled — and configured to start automatically at boot.
Questions? Problems?
If you would like to know more about the Local Session Manager service, or you have a specific problem, please feel free to get in touch. We will do our best to help you!
We’re running a VB application as a service with AlwaysUp. Everything seems to be working except for in one situation.
Can AlwaysUp detect when my program hangs with a dialog box waiting to press OK to continue? The application doesn’t work properly if the dialog stays open.
I found NirCmd, which can click buttons and send text to windows, but how do I use it with AlwaysUp?
— Rose
Hi Rose.
Unnecessary prompts are an enemy of 24/7 operation.
As you’ve seen, it can be very frustrating when a silly prompt holds up the action, waiting for you to click a button or hit the escape key!
Fortunately AlwaysUp can quickly dismiss those intrusive prompts on your behalf — even when you are not around.
Let’s dig into the details.
AlwaysUp automatically dismisses standard “application crashed” dialogs
When an application crashes, Windows may throw up a prompt to inform you of the problem. And you must acknowledge that prompt for the application to terminate.
But what happens if you’re not there to dismiss the crash dialog? Nothing good, unfortunately.
Until you dismiss the dialog, your application’s process will linger on in a “zombie” state — dead on its feet. You’ll see it in Task Manager but it will be completely unresponsive to network requests, file changes and any other operations that would normally trigger activity. And a lifeless program can cause problems for you and your team.
We built AlwaysUp to dismiss those dialogs on your behalf — quickly and automatically. To illustrate, here are three of the prompts that AlwaysUp handles.
Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library dialogs
Windows shows the “Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library” dialog when your application causes a problem for the Visual C++ components.
AlwaysUp will automatically click the “OK” button for you.
Visual Basic run-time dialogs
A Visual Basic application throws up this window when it runs into trouble.
AlwaysUp will automatically click the “End” button to exit the application.
AlwaysUp will automatically click the “Aceptar” (OK) button to close the window for you.
So AlwaysUp covers the standard Windows dialogs. But what about application-specific prompts? We’ll deal with those in the next section.
Plug in an automation to complete fields and click buttons in any dialog box
While it can handle the standard dialogs, AlwaysUp needs your help to dismiss application-specific dialogs. Indeed, without your guidance, AlwaysUp has no idea what to do when faced with an arbitrary prompt from your program!
For example, suppose you’re running iTunes as a service and it starts by showing this prompt:
You must click the OK button to dismiss the window so that iTunes can proceed.
But when you start iTunes as a Windows Service with AlwaysUp, it runs in the background on an invisible desktop. Because of that, you won’t be able to see or click the OK button and iTunes will hang — indefinitely.
To overcome that problem, you’ll have to:
Create a Windows automation that clicks the OK button on the iTunes dialog;
Instruct AlwaysUp to run that automation periodically.
Creating an automation to dismiss a dialog with AutoIt
We recommend using AutoIt to create your automation. It’s popular, powerful and straightforward. For example, the AutoIt script to dismiss the iTunes dialog contains a single line of code:
; Sends the ESC key to dismiss any iTunes prompt. ControlSend("iTunes", "", "", "{ESC}")
Process Name: Specifies the process that created the desired window. You can specify only the process name or the full path of the process. If this parameter is empty string (""), the command will be executed on any process.
Window Title: Specifies the title of the window that you want to execute the action. If this parameter is empty string (""), the command will be executed on any window, regardless the window title.
Action: You can specify one of the following options:
click: Click the specified button. You can specify one of the following predefined values (For standard Windows dialog-boxes only!): yes, no, ok, cancel, retry, ignore, close, help. You can also specify any control ID as a numeric value.
settext: Set the text of the specified control. The first parameter of this action specifies the ID of the control, and the second parameter specifies the text.
For example, NirCmd will dismiss our iTunes dialog with the following command:
nircmd dlg "itunes.exe" "iTunes" click ok
Have AlwaysUp run your automation
And once you’ve created an automation that dismisses your dialog, you can plug it into AlwaysUp in a few steps:
Save your automation in an executable or batch file.
For AutoIt, you can use the AutoIt Script to EXE Converter to create an executable from your script:
And for NirCmd, simply save your command to a batch file:
Be sure to specify the full path to the NirCmd executable file in your batch file.
Next, start AlwaysUp.
Edit your application and switch to the Automate tab.
Check the box at the top to enable automation. Afterwards, enter the full path to your automation executable or batch file.
And finally, indicate how often you want your automation to run. For iTunes, we’d like to dismiss prompts every minute:
Save your changes.
And that’s it. With your NirCmd (or AutoIt) automation plugged into AlwaysUp, your dialogs will be automatically dismissed — without you having to do anything at all.
AlwaysUp has been invaluable to our business, which is why I’ve bought several copies for different machines.
Recently I started running into a problem on my production PC. I searched for a bit through your FAQs and blogs but didn’t see this particular problem. Maybe you have a quick workaround?
But sometimes the G: drive disappears after a while, even though AlwaysUp shows Google Drive running.
When that happens, my application goes haywire. Eventually, I’ll have to debug to keep the app from crashing when the G drive is not available, but in the meantime, do you have an answer for what’s happening?
I will appreciate any help you can provide.
— Randy
Hi Randy, thanks for reaching out to report the problem. No one on our team has seen Google Drive failing as you described so we can’t say precisely what going on, sorry.
But we can offer a couple of solutions that should (1) lessen the occurrence of the problem and (2) quickly restore functionality when the problem arises.
Solution #1: Have AlwaysUp restart Google Drive every night
If Drive breaks after it’s been running for some time, the program may have a resource leak.
Perhaps Drive isn’t freeing all the RAM it’s requested. Or it may be holding on to a network port for too long. Or it could be something else. It’s difficult to pinpoint the issue because we don’t have access to the source code (or to decent log files, for that matter).
For mysterious situations like this, we recommend introducing a nightly restart. That is, you should have AlwaysUp automatically restart Google Drive at a set time when no one is likely to be using it.
The theory is that restarting Google Drive will clear out any resource leaks. Afterwards, the program will come up “fresh” and ready to do its work — at least for the next few hours.
To restart Drive nightly:
Edit Google Drive in AlwaysUp (select Application > Edit/View “Google Drive for desktop” from the menu).
In the Edit/View Application window that comes up, switch to the Monitor tab.
Check the Every box, select Day from the drop-down and choose a convenient time to restart Google Drive. 2 AM works for us:
Save your changes.
With that setting in place, AlwaysUp will restart Drive every night at 2 AM. And as a result, no instance of Drive will run for longer than a day. If we’re lucky, no resource leak will grow fast enough to cripple Drive within those 24 hours.
But if we’re not dealing with a resource leak and Drive can stop working at any time, a nightly restart won’t help much. Fortunately, the next solution tackles the problem more directly.
Solution #2: Install a sanity check to detect the failure and automatically restart Google Drive
We built AlwaysUp to handle a range of failures while running an application. For example, AlwaysUp can detect and automatically recycle programs that:
Use too much memory;
Run wild with the CPU;
Get stuck at a crash window;
Become unresponsive to input.
For those cases, you simply specify the restrictions (e.g. the maximum RAM to use) and AlwaysUp will deal with any violations on your behalf.
But none of those built-in capabilities will help with your Google Drive problem. When Drive fails, it’s not related to CPU, RAM or any of the metrics that AlwaysUp tracks. It’s about knowing when your G drive isn’t mapped.
To handle non-standard failures like yours, we must rely on AlwaysUp’s Sanity Check feature. We’ll write a batch file that detects when the G drive isn’t mapped and then show you how to plug that into AlwaysUp.
Download our sanity check to detect when your G drive isn’t available
Here is the batch file we developed for your situation:
@echooff:: This batch file checks if a drive letter is mapped or not.:: It exits with 0 if the drive is mapped and 1 if it isn't.SETgdrive=G
ifexist%gdrive%:\ (
echo The %gdrive% drive is mapped Exiting with 0 to continue running.
exit /b 0
)
echo The %gdrive% drive is NOT mapped. Exiting with 1 to restart.
exit /b 1
As you can see, it simply checks if the G:\ folder exists and returns:
0 if G:\ is accessible
1 if G:\ cannot be accessed
Please download the script and save it in a known location on your computer running Google Drive. We’ll use it in the next step.
Plug the sanity check into AlwaysUp
Since we have a batch file to detect the problem, let’s tell AlwaysUp how to use it:
Edit Google Drive in AlwaysUp (select Application > Edit/View “Google Drive for desktop” from the menu).
In the Edit/View Application window that comes up, switch to the Monitor tab.
Check the Whenever it fails a “sanity check” box and click the … button:
In the Configure Sanity Check window that comes up, enter the full path to the batch file in the Run field and specify how often to perform the sanity check. Every 5 minutes should be enough so that’s what we entered:
Save your changes.
And with that sanity check in place, AlwaysUp will run the batch file every 5 minutes. If the batch file returns 0, indicating that the G drive is available, nothing will happen. AlwaysUp will continue to babysit Google Drive (and schedule the next check for 5 minutes later).
But if the batch file returns 1 — because it couldn’t access the G drive — AlwaysUp will promptly shut down Google Drive and start a new copy. Doing so should restore access to the G drive.
Posted onDecember 17, 2023 (Revised January 4, 2024)
Our team released AlwaysUp version 15 on December 8 — just in time for the holidays. 🙂
This time, we focused on making AlwaysUp better at identifying technical problems and providing excellent support when things don’t go as expected. Here are a few highlights:
AlwaysUp now collects helpful application diagnostics — so you don’t have to
Most customers have AlwaysUp installed and running their application as a Windows Service in a few minutes. But sometimes things get tricky and you need assistance from our excellent support team.
Starting in version 15, AlwaysUp will collect all the information on your behalf. Simply select Advanced > Collect Diagnostic Information to bring up the step-by-step wizard (shown here interrogating OneDrive):
Click Next and in a few seconds AlwaysUp will deliver text describing your setup:
Save the text to a file (or copy it to the clipboard) and include it in an email to our technical support team. Easy peasy!
Find out more about this convenient, time-saving feature on the application diagnostics page.
Introducing advanced monitoring for popular applications: Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive
To provide a better experience for those customers, AlwaysUp 15 includes code that works closely with those applications to detect (and shout) when things go awry.
For example, AlwaysUp will now warn you if OneDrive is showing an unrecognized prompt. We bring that to your attention because it might mean that OneDrive is stuck waiting for your input and isn’t synchronizing your files:
We plan to build on this comprehensive detection framework in future releases — to reduce the number of headaches in your life.
Running an unstable application? Configure hourly restarts to keep it “fresh”
If you’re working with an application that can barely stay healthy for 60 minutes, you have our sympathies!
But even more than that, you now have a way to safely restart the application every hour — at the minute of your choosing.
The new “Every Hour” option is available for selection on the Monitor tab:
Other fixes & improvements
Windows shutdown is unpredictable and often chaotic. In fact, applications can be terminated in random order, so you’re never quite sure how things will unfold.
This version of AlwaysUp makes use of technical mechanisms to inform Windows what’s going on at system shutdown. And that can make a significant difference for applications that take a while to exit gracefully.
The Application Advisor — which makes it easy to set up a dozen popular applications as Windows Services — got smarter when installing OneDrive. A new two-minute restart delay tolerates unpredictable automatic updates, while a new shutdown command ensures that OneDrive closes smoothly when exiting.
We fixed a problem where an application with unusual characters in its name couldn’t write records to the Windows Event Logs.
As usual, please review the release notes for the full list of features, fixes and improvements included in AlwaysUp version 15.
Upgrading to AlwaysUp 15
If you purchased AlwaysUp version 14 (after November 2022), you can upgrade to version 15 for free. Simply download and install “over the top” to preserve your existing applications and all settings. Your registration code will continue to work as well.
If you bought AlwaysUp version 13 or earlier (before November 2022), you will need to upgrade to use version 15. Consequently, please purchase upgrades here — at a 50% discount.
(888) 881-CORE
We’re running a VB application as a service with AlwaysUp. Everything seems to be working except for in one situation.
