CodeTwo services do not start

Problem:

CodeTwo software service that is supposed to start automatically after the system restart would not start.

Applies to:

• Any service-based CodeTwo software.
• For problems with MS Exchange Transport service in connection to CodeTwo Exchange Rules family products please consult this article.

Solution:

There may be multiple reasons to which a service would not start. In general those kinds of problems are common for systems with performance issues, especially environments with a small amount of free RAM memory. When diagnosing service startup problems please check first how is your system doing in terms of memory usage. Consider either disabling some other services or expanding RAM - this should be rather easy if we are talking here about a virtualized environment. Be also aware that some MS Exchange Server services tend to allocate all available memory. There are built-in mechanisms that should release this memory for third-party applications but according to many admins, this often fails. If this is the case you might want to move CodeTwo software installation to another machine (of course, assuming we are discussing here an application that does not require direct Exchange Server installation).

Fig. 1. Do you have enough free memory?

Some services, including CodeTwo ones, do not work standalone but depend on other services. If those other services are not working properly CodeTwo ones will not start, or stop working in the case the problem with dependencies emerged later on, not at startup. Please check if all services visible in dependencies tab of Windows services menu are in fine health. Be aware, that some Microsoft's services may look healthy now but are actually not starting properly at system startup. If Windows or Exchange services do not start properly at first CodeTwo services may not be even called by the system to start at all. You may want to review your Event Viewer log files to check if there were any problems with MS services (especially Exchange services) after restarting the system, however, diagnosing that may be difficult.

Fig. 2. Dependencies of a service.

Providing you have enough free memory and all dependencies are fine you can apply one of the below workarounds to make sure that CodeTwo service starts up after system restart:

• Extend timeout for service start. Click here for our knowledge base article on that.
• Some services are fit to be run as scheduled (for example synchronization services), click here to find out more.
• You can change a service start mode from automatic to automatic delayed start. This will make the service start after all other automatic services. The downside is that it may take a few minutes before such a delayed service starts but will help you avoid problems with dependencies not being available at the moment of CodeTwo service startup.

Fig. 3. Changing startup type to delayed.

• In the case of CodeTwo Exchange Sync you can also introduce some registry changes to extend the time CodeTwo synchronization service awaits for MS Exchange Information Store service connection. By default, CodeTwo Exchange Sync synchronization service waits 30 seconds for the Information Store to respond. This may not be enough. To extend this time log on to the machine where CodeTwo Exchange Sync is installed using the account under which synchronization service is configured to run. This is important as the registry changes are going to be applied under HKCU which is current user branch. If you modify the registry while logged on as another user the changes will not affect the synchronization service. Add the following subfolder in your registry:

HKCU\\Software\\CodeTwo\\CodeTwo Exchange Sync Service

After that add the following DWORD key in the above folder:

OpenMsgStoreDelayedAttempts

With a decimal value of your choice. As the default is 30 you may want to extend this time considerably, for example to 90 (which effectively means 90 seconds).

Fig. 4. Windows Registry after changes.

See also:

• How to extend the timeout for services if they do fail to start or stop