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Task control? There's an app for that…

Andrew_G_
Level 5
Employee Accredited

Another day, another issue from a different era….

 

Enterprise Vault comes with a little utility to control services and tasks, called EVService.exe. You can find it in the install folder, typically C:\Program Files(x86)\Enterprise Vault. This was written many moons ago to allow easy control of services so they could be stopped and started from a script as part of your backup process. Of course, now there's Backup Mode instead, so all that fiddling with services and tasks is not needed as part of that process, but this little utility still persists.

 

And as it turns out, it doesn't do exactly what it says on the tin.

 

The usage goes something like this:

EVService start EVSERVER "Enterprise Vault Storage Service"

 

As you'd expect, that will attempt to connect to the Windows Service Control Manager on EVSERVER and start the storage service.

 

 

Where it can go a little awry is with tasks:

EVService start EVSERVER "Index Administration Task"

 

The intention here is obviously to start the index admin task on EVSERVER. However, Enterprise Vault tasks are not controlled by their name, but by their id, so EVService has to look up the task by name to get it's id. Unfortunately, and for reasons lost in the mists of time, the given EVSERVER is taken simply to be the connection point to the Enterprise Vault Directory. The task is found by name alone, and the result of that lookup is both the task id, and also the computer where the matching task resides.

 

That's not necessarily a problem...unless you have two tasks with an identical name. For example, you have a couple or three Enterprise Vault Servers with an Index Administration Task on each one. Now the task that will be controlled is the one that pops out of the directory first and that might not be the one on the EVSERVER you specified.

 

The good news is that this is fixed in 11.0.1 CHF2. The (potentially) bad news is that the EVSERVER name you specify to control tasks must now match the alias you used when the Enterprise Vault server was installed. This is visible on the Admin Console:

 

                                     clip.png

 

 

One other small change to note is in the usage of the utility with a file listing the services and/or tasks to control. The usage is:

EVService start listfile.txt

 

where listfile.txt contains entries like this:

EVSERVER:Index Administration task

 

Previously, the EVSERVER name in the list file could only be up to 15 characters long. Again the reasons for this are lost in the haze of history, but this is obviously going to be too short in the majority of cases, and so it's been updated to allow a maximum of 128 characters.

 

 

 

As mentioned above, this utility was really there for backup, so if you are still using it we'd be interested to know what your use case is; either via a comment or, if it's a bit hush-hush, a private message.