MCE_Vista: MceIr pipe is not available

[comstriker]

Excuse me comstriker, that processwatcher method sound good to me, but what exactly is the event that you use to trigger the service restart?".

When the Process Watcher plugin is enabled, you should be able to observe the event by typing "net stop AlternateMceIrService". In eventghost, this will generate the event "Process.Destroyed.AlternateMceIrService_x64"


HOWEVER, I THINK I FOUND A MUCH SIMPLER SOLUTION:

You can have Windows restart a service automatically if it fails (DUH! )
- Go to your services (Start->Run->services.msc)
- Right click on AlternateMceIrService -> Properties -> Recovery
- On all of the failure drop down boxes set it to "Restart the Service"
- I told mine to restart the service after 1 minute

Tested this by killing the service in Process Explorer, and it successfully restarted the service. So, i'm pretty confident this should work if the service actually crashes. BOOM! HEADSHOT! PM me if you have any other questions

[Luca Brasi]

Hi comstriker,

is your solution working reliably? Would be slick as you don't have to take care of admin privileges for restarting the service...
But I am not sure if the service will actually crash or just get unresponsive when the error occurs.

This is how I've been running things:
- Installed EG App Control
- Set up of a "Fire event on log entry" action, put it to autostart
- Have it look for "MCE_Vista: MceIr pipe is not available", let it trigger an event like LogMessageMatchMCEError
- Have a macro run on that event which calls hstart.exe which will run a bat restarting the service with admin rights.

[comstriker]

Luca Brasi,
I've been on work trips and the middle of moving so I haven't even had my stuff set up for a couple months...

When I first looked for a solution to this problem, the remote had stopped working, and I verified that the service was in fact "stopped" in Windows Services. So, unless that behavior outcome is inconsistent the service does crash and windows should automatically restart it.

As for your solution, how do you have the batch file automatically run with admin privs? Won't UAC prompt you to allow the program to run?

[Luca Brasi]

Hi comstriker,

thanks for getting back!

So, unless that behavior outcome is inconsistent the service does crash and windows should automatically restart it.

As it is not easy to provoke the crash I couldn't test that reliably. Can you confirm that it restarts? I tried it and still mce wasn't working.

As for your solution, how do you have the batch file automatically run with admin privs? Won't UAC prompt you to allow the program to run?

hstart will take care of that. It will run the bat in admin mode. Unless you go for the pro version of hstart you will still have to deal with uac. As I already turned it off on that machine I didn't care... Should have mentioned that in my last post though

[comstriker]

I'll try to get better at checking this lol..

As it is not easy to provoke the crash I couldn't test that reliably. Can you confirm that it restarts? I tried it and still mce wasn't working.

What exactly did you try? And no I haven't been able to test any of this at all as all my stuff is in storage for another month or so.
Did you try telling windows to restart the service automatically, and then manually killing it with a cmd prompt?

Or were you saying you've had it legitimately crash and windows failed to restart it?

[chrisvogan]

My solution was to edit the __init__py file to stop and start the server when it detects that the pipe has crashed.

Added the following:
eg.TriggerEvent("MceIR pipe not found.")
time.sleep(.25)
service = Service(u"AlternateMceIrService")
eg.PrintNotice("Stop")
service.Stop()
time.sleep(.50)
service.Start()
eg.PrintNotice("Started")