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AlwaysUp 11.8: Hourly Restarts, Helpful Application Info, Improved Email Alerts + More

New Release

AlwaysUp version 11.8 is out!

Here are some highlights of this new release:

Automatically restart your application every 2, 4, 6, 8 or 12 hours

Are you running a legacy application that leaks memory or other resources? Does restarting it cure all ills?

If a daily restart is not enough, you can now recycle your program more frequently — as often as every 2 hours.

The new periods are available in the Every setting on the Monitor tab. Expand the drop-down to select the desired time frame:

Restart your application more frequently

Of course, please use this new power with caution. Very few applications need to be restarted 12 times a day! Be sure to consider the impact on your customers, who may be interrupted as your software goes up and down during working hours.

View relevant file information in the “Running” tooltip

When your application is running as a Windows Service in AlwaysUp, you can click the green “Running” circle () to show details of the running process.

That popup now includes additional information. It highlights key “metadata” of the executable file being run:

  • File description: A free-form description of the file — usually the name of the product or a component (e.g. “Dropbox” or “iTunes”).

  • File version: The version number of the file. Usually 4 digits in dotted notation (e.g. “5.45.3.1672”) but can also contain a build/version identifier.

  • File date: The date and time when the file was last modified.

  • Company: The name of the company that produced the file.

Here is what the new tooltip looks like (when running Plex Media Server as a service):

View file information

We added this information to help customers manage change. For example, if an automatic update installed new software and your setup isn’t working as expected, the version number and the date will alert you that the executable file was recently updated.

By the way, you can see most of these values in the executable file’s properties. In Windows File Explorer, right-click the file and select “Properties” to summon an informative popup. The metadata will be available on the “Details” tab:

View file information

Receive email alerts whenever the service stops

AlwaysUp can be configured to send you an email alert whenever your application stops. That option is available on the Email tab.

However, prior to this version, AlwaysUp would not send a message when the application was stopped because the underlying Windows Service exited. This was fine when the service was stopped from the AlwaysUp console, but not when the service was being closed by Windows (e.g. as part of a system shutdown). The behavior has been updated and email will now always be sent.

One note from our development team though: Emailing when the system is shutting down may not be 100% reliable. At shutdown, Windows may abruptly close AlwaysUp before it has had a chance to send the email. Furthermore, some supporting systems (which have been signaled to close) may not be available to deliver an email.

Other fixes & improvements

  • If your application is running and you change the startup type to “Disabled”, AlwaysUp will no longer stop the application. This new behavior is in line with Services.msc.

  • If an application/service marked as “Disabled” is running, it can now be stopped from AlwaysUp.

  • Command-line operations to start, stop or restart the application/service were ignoring the “silent” parameter and always showing the progress window. This has been fixed.

  • Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library errors/popups are now classified as fatal. If your application encounters one of these errors, and the “stop when the most serious are encountered” box on the Extras tab is checked, your application will be stopped and restarted as specified.

  • Several small under-the-hood tweaks for the March 2019 preview of Windows 10 are included in this release. (There were no significant changes to Windows Services in that iteration of the OS.)

As usual, please review the release notes for the full list of features, fixes and improvements included in this release.

Upgrading to AlwaysUp Version 11.8

If you purchased AlwaysUp version 10 (after January 2017) you can upgrade to version 11.8 at no additional charge. Simply download and install “over the top” to preserve your existing applications and all settings. Your registration code will continue to work.

If you bought AlwaysUp version 9 or earlier (before January 2017), you will need to upgrade to use version 11.8. Please purchase upgrades here — at a 50% discount.

See the full upgrade policy for additional details.

Enjoy!

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Q&A: Can my Legacy Application Read Network Drives when Run as a Service?

Q & A - Accessing Network Shares from Windows Services
  I am evaluating AlwaysUp. I have a legacy application which must run as a local user. I can get it to run as a service using AlwaysUp.

The application works with parameters. These point to a domain folder (eg. \\MyServer\Data1\). There is an obvious contradiction on one hand, running an application as a local machine user, and on the other hand, trying to access a domain folder. Wondering if there is any way AlwaysUp can accommodate this?

I have mapped a drive from the local user to the network folder and cached credentials. This works. Only problem is cached credentials sometimes expire.

— David

Hi David.

Since your application must run as a local user, you should specify the account on AlwaysUp’s Logon tab:

Enter your Windows account on the Logon tab

Please enter the username and password for a user that has logged in and run your application successfully — likely the account you are logged into now.

With that account in place, AlwaysUp will run your legacy application in the context of that user. Your program will be able to read from and write to any files that the account has permission to access.

However, as you point out, using drive letters can be tricky. Beyond cached/saved credentials, drive mappings may not be automatically applied when you login as a service. For example, that “P” drive you see in Windows Explorer may not be available to your program running as a Windows Service.

Fortunately, AlwaysUp can usually re-create your drive mappings. Check the Attempt to automatically reconnect all network drives option on the Extras tab to enable that feature:

Automatically reconnect network drives

But as the text implies, automatically reconnecting doesn’t work in all situations. Sometimes a password is required.

To totally sidestep the issues of drive letters when running as a service, we recommend using UNC paths instead of mapped drives whenever possible. Since your account has permissions to the underlying resource, that shouldn’t pose a problem.

Will your application accept a UNC path? Please test to find out.

Troubleshooting network/mapped drives (and other issues)

By the way, launching the command line interactively as a Windows Service through AlwaysUp will give you the opportunity to experiment with your application as a service.

For example, you can try to:

  • Change the directory (CD) to the UNC path and confirm that the files are accessible

  • Run the full command to launch your legacy application with UNC path parameters. If it fails, you may have a permissions issue. Look to your application’s log files for clues.

Best of luck with your legacy program/service! Please get in touch if you have any other questions.

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Q&A: Can I Activate/Register AlwaysUp Without an Internet Connection?

Q & A - No Internet
  My company is interested in your AlwaysUp software. We would like to implement it in computers which are not connected to the Internet. These computers can’t be connected to the Internet, not even for a few minutes.

Is it possible to activate the license without the Internet?

— Florian

Hi Florian.

The machine running AlwaysUp does not need to be connected to the Internet to register the software. Your situation is perfectly fine, and we have many customers running AlwaysUp on isolated computers.

However you will need to access the Internet from another machine, to complete the online registration process. Here is an overview of the procedure.

How to activate AlwaysUp on your offline computer

To register your installation of AlwaysUp, you will:

  1. Get the AlwaysUp-generated serial number from the isolated machine running your application/Windows Service.

    AlwaysUp Serial Number
  2. Switch over to a computer connected to the Internet. Find the email we sent thanking you for your purchase and click the Manage your order button to visit your order page in your web browser:

    Your AlwaysUp Order Page
  3. Click the Assign a license to a computer button. Enter the serial number you collected in step 1 (along with a brief description of your installation/machine):

    Assign your AlwaysUp License
  4. Click the Go to Step 2 button to proceed and generate your registration code. Copy that code.

    Assign your AlwaysUp License
  5. Return to your AlwaysUp machine and type in the registration code:

    Enter the Registration Code

    AlwaysUp will confirm that it is registered and you will be good to go!

    AlwaysUp successfully registered

And once registered, AlwaysUp will not use the Internet — unless you have configured email alerts, or you manually invoke the “check for updates” functionality.

Hope this makes sense! Please get in touch if you have any other questions.

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Q & A: What is the Status of my Backup and Sync Windows Service?

Q & A - Backup and Sync status
  I’m trialing your product for running Google Backup and Sync as a service. Is there any way to see what is the update status? All I see is the option to click the info and see how long the service has been running.

— Sharon

Hi Sharon.

Unfortunately, no — there is no way for you to see exactly what Backup and Sync is doing through AlwaysUp.

This is because AlwaysUp is a generic “application runner” designed to launch any program as a service.

Once it launches your application, AlwaysUp will monitor the new process for:

  • Excessive CPU usage
  • High memory consumption
  • Crashes
  • Hangs
  • Error messages
  • Popup windows

You can see some of these details by clicking the green “Running” circle on your application’s entry in AlwaysUp:

Googledrivesync.exe process information

The list above contains almost everything AlwaysUp knows. Beyond those generic items, AlwaysUp has no specific knowledge of the application it is running.

In your particular situation, AlwaysUp hasn’t a clue what Backup and Sync is supposed to do, and it doesn’t know how to check the status of the file synchronization. AlwaysUp doesn’t even know what file synchronization is! 🙂

But while you won’t get help from AlwaysUp, there are other ways to see what Backup and Sync is up to…

3 ways to check the status of Backup and Sync

1.  Check Backup and Sync’s tray icon

The easiest way to tell what Backup and Sync is doing is to activate its tray icon (). A helpful window will pop up to show you recent notifications and activity:

Backup and Sync tray icon activity

But there is a problem. When Backup and Sync runs as a Windows Service, it operates in the background (on the isolated Session 0) and cannot display its trusty tray icon on your desktop.

You have a couple of options to see the tray icon.

First, you can stop Backup and Sync in AlwaysUp and run it normally on your desktop. If you don’t have a desktop or quicklaunch icon, you can start Backup and Sync by double-clicking this file:

C:\Program Files\Google\Drive\googledrivesync.exe

Once you are done with the tray icon, exit Backup and Sync and return to AlwaysUp to restart the 24/7 service.

Or you could select Application > Restart “Googledrivesync” in this session to have AlwaysUp restart Backup and Sync on your desktop:

Restart Googledrivesync in this session

The tray icon will appear in a few seconds.

2.  Check file synchronization activity on the Google Drive website

If you don’t want to interrupt Backup and Sync on your computer, you can inspect Google Drive’s activity online.

To see a list of recent uploads and other events:

  1. Open your web browser and go to https://drive.google.com

  2. On the left, click My Drive.

  3. In the upper right, click the information icon to reveal the right panel

  4. In the right panel, Click Activity

    Google Drive activity

Watch out for new (or updated) files on your PC’s hard drive that are don’t show up in the activity stream. Those documents have not been uploaded to the cloud.

3.  Dig into the local synchronization log file

Backup and Sync tracks its activities in a text file. You can find the file in your AppData folder:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Drive\user_default\sync_log.log

Be warned: the content is very technical!

The purpose of the file is to help Google’s engineers diagnose defects — not to give the rest of us a friendly view of file synchronization.

Nevertheless, we have found file useful in a couple of scenarios:

  1. To verify that Backup and Sync is doing anything at all. If nothing is logged in response to file and folder changes, the software may be dead.

  2. To see if Backup and Sync has recognized a new file. In this scenario, open the log and search for the new file by name.

    For example, this log entry suggests that Backup and Sync has identified and is about to upload our “AlwaysUpUserManual-March-2019.pdf” document:

    sync_log.log activity

The log file contains other goodies for the technically inclined…

Happy synchronizing!

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