WCS won't start/run - Health Monitor is already running

Question

I am posting here my frustrations with running WCS in a Virtual Machine (VMWare) and just wanted to let everyone know what my issue was and what fixed it. WCS will complain when the memory is below 2.0 GB at the time of installation, but does not stipulate that this will cause it to not work, only that performance will be affected. Until my server arrives, I am forced to run WCS in a VM on a Windows XP desktop that has 3 GB of RAM. Not wanting to suck up too much RAM for the VM due to the fact that the workstation is used for other applications, I selected 1.0 GB of RAM. WCS installed and started the services fine. I pulled up the login page locally just to be sure. When I came back to work today, it was down. The wcs-0-0.log indicated everything was fine, but the apache_error.log showed this:
[Thu Apr 23 18:46:45 2009] [notice] Child 4064: Listening on port 443.
[Thu Apr 23 18:46:45 2009] [notice] Child 4064: Listening on port 80.
[Thu Apr 23 18:48:17 2009] [notice] Parent: Received shutdown signal -- Shutting down the server.
[Thu Apr 23 18:48:17 2009] [notice] Child 4064: Exit event signaled. Child process is ending.
So you can see that it shut down after a couple of minutes. When I ran the WCSStatus link, it showed only that "Health monitor is already running." - that's all. So with that non-specific error, I was left to continue the struggle on my own. No current posts in the NetPro forum describe my issue, although bug CSCsx34113 was close:
Windows logout causes Apache process and WCS JVM to exit
Symptom:
When a user log outs of the physical console of a Win2K3 server, the Apache process and the WCS JVM exit.
Conditions:
This only affects Win2K3 servers, and only happens when logging out of the physical console. Logging out of a Remote Desktop does not cause the processes to exit
Workaround:
Do not log out of the physical console, if you must use it.
Use Remote Desktop.
Further Problem Description:
None
I decided to bump the RAM to 2.0 GB on the VM anyways, and restart the VM. BINGO! WCS is up and operational. Hope this helps...
Regards,
Scott

Answer 1

Hey all, I have also experienced issues with services shutting down when logging out of WCS on a Remote Desktop session to the WCS server. I have experienced this with every version of WCS I have installed from 4.2 up to 5.2.x. If I were to launch WCS in a browser on the server everything was fine until I closed the browser (a logout probaby does the same thing). I always used to check my upgrades to make sure everything worked ok and then when I logged off I couldn't run WCS remotely and would eventually have to restart the WCS server to resolve the issue.
With the 6.0.132.0 code I just made sure NOT to launch WCS in a browser on the server. I performed my check remotely and avoided the whole issue.
For grins I just tested this by launching a browser on the WCS server and signing in and out of the application. It continued to run (never did in previous versions). It looks like perhaps this may have been resolved (at least for me) in the 6.0.132.0 WCS code.