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“Run Program” Activity Fails against Windows 2003 Client

Activities, Bugs, Orchestrator 2012, System Center No Responses »

May 282012

I have opened this bug report on Connect and am curious as to if anyone else has run into this issue as well. If you have, please vote it up – it appears there isn’t much about this issue that I can find online. Some users report a fault in a .NET module while others, like me, notice the behavior below. Text of bug report follows.

When attempting to use “Run Program” against Windows 2003 Server the run book immediately fails.
From the Runbook Tester, you’ll receive an immediate error of “Could not start the Orchastrator Run Program Service service on <server> – The service did not respond to to the start or control request in a timely fashion”

From the side of the server, event viewer states that “Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for the Orchestrator Run Program Service service to connect”

Based on those errors, and the additional information obtained from http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/scogeneral/thread/0a120a12-8514-44cf-991a-cd6d86da28a9
and
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/scogeneral/thread/ebf059ac-44cc-43b7-82d1-fbc03b063e7e

Additionally, slightly before that event, this occurred for the same user:
Description:
Windows saved user <DOMAIN\SCORCHACCT> registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user’s registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.
This is often caused by services running as a user account, try configuring the services to run in either the LocalService or NetworkService account.

and this is from the Audit log when the SCO account attempted to access the remote server
Special privileges assigned to new logon:
User Name: uname
Domain: dom
Logon ID: (0×0,0xC4FE95)
Privileges: SeSecurityPrivilege
SeBackupPrivilege
SeRestorePrivilege
SeTakeOwnershipPrivilege
SeSystemEnvironmentPrivilege
SeLoadDriverPrivilege
SeImpersonatePrivilege

It appears that the application seems to be faulting with the communication with the server somewhere along the line. The above forum posts list a possible, fault, but I am unable to even get it that far.

This has been tested on both Windows 2003 Enterprise Server (32-bit) and Windows 2003 Standard Server (64bit) and the exact same issues appear for both.

The Orchestrator Peg in the System Center Hole

Orchestrator 2010, System Center 3 Responses »

Jan 312012

In 2009 Microsoft acquired Opalis. They made some improvements to it, and this year they re-wrote it, renamed it “Orchestrator”, and placed it under the “System Center” moniker. It’s a tool aimed at process automation. We’ve been told repeatedly that it’s aimed at ‘non-developers’ and that it’s drag and drop Runbooks would facilitate quick and easy automation for everyone, freeing up the System Admins from having to figure out exactly what the end user wants.

Now, in theory, this sounds pretty nice, right? We don’t have to try to decipher exactly what people want, nor do we have to take up our valuable time by working on a complicated automation. Now, I run into two issues with this. One being that although runbooks are easier than coding up a solution, it’s still not easy enough for the average end user. So we’ll still end up doing it – but hey, at least it’ll be quicker, right? Maybe. And two – this is just yet another automation tool in the System Center family – one that’s fairly ripe with it, considering that every System Center tool offers some kind of automation already builtin.

So what’s it good for then?

Good question. And I’ve think I’ve found a few traditional solutions for it – the largest being that it can act as a mediator in between different systems, especially those that are on different platforms. So it will make a nice middleware piece to quickly integrate data retrieved from a Windows application into a Unix application. While everyone should be using web services these days for data transformation, it just doesn’t exist at the level I’d like to see. So this is a nice fix – not exactly a bandaid, but not the most robust solution ever, either.

However, Orchestrator is kind of awesome for doing crazy things with it. Which is what I’m going to show you. Read on to learn the scenario and what we’re going to do.