Alteryx Connect Service won't start after new Microsoft patch

[Svetlozara]

Dear All,

We are experiencing an issue where we are unable to reach the Alteryx Connect website after installing the new Microsoft patch update on the server.  We discovered that the Alteryx Connect service is stopping on its own and we have not been able to understand why.  We can manually start it up but after some minutes(30-35mins) the Service Status switches over to Stopped.

The logs don't point any issues.  In fact the end of the connect_catalina log and the Service_Status log both end with the message: "Alteryx Connect is ready to serve"

The the commons-daemon-2022.06.29 logs said:

[2022-06-29 14:03:26] [info]  [ 2080] Commons Daemon procrun (1.0.15.0 64-bit) started

[2022-06-29 14:03:26] [info]  [ 2080] Running 'AlteryxConnect' Service...

[2022-06-29 14:03:26] [info]  [ 2488] Starting service...

[2022-06-29 14:03:26] [info]  [ 2488] Service started in 0 ms.

[2022-06-29 14:37:38] [info]  [ 2080] Run service finished.

[2022-06-29 14:37:38] [info]  [ 2080] Commons Daemon procrun finished

The localhost_access logs are saved but they are empty.

The Connect version we are using is v18-3-7. Last month we faced same problem and we were forced to rollback the new patch hopefully it was some bug on it. Now the problem still exist with this month patch release. Not updating Windows server isn`t an option, so we are looking for other solution.

Please let me know if you have any ideas that we could do to fix this issue.

We have reviewed this topic:

Alteryx Connect Service Won't Start - Alteryx Community

thread the problem in it is similar but we still need assistance.

Thanks,

Svetlozara

[PetrH]

Hi @Svetlozara , 

would you mind to share full catalina.log (the provided fragment is not complete startup. It might be deleted while instance is down and fresh catalina would be created and contain only the fresh startup. Feel free to anonymize it before sharing here, but there should not be anything compromising on fresh log.
You can also contact Alteryx support and provide the log secure way. 
Thanks Petr
Connect team

[Svetlozara]

Hi @PetrH  ,

Thank you for your inclusion. 

I attach the catalina log provided by my colleagues.

Best Regards,

Svetlozara 

[PetrH · Accepted solution]

Hi @Svetlozara , 
Thank you for sharing log file, let me share my quick initial ideas based on provided log:

- I would check that port (to bind connect application is FREE -> reffering to line in log
java.net.BindException: Address already in use: JVM_Bind 

I would check ports mentioned in server.xml(config file) are FREE - like line 60 in my case its listening on port 80 --->
<Connector port="80" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="120000" redirectPort="8443" />
and alternatively other ports like 8005, 8009, 443 if SSL is in place.

Hint: You can use "netstat" to check whether a port is available or not. Use the netstat -anp | find "port number" command to find whether a port is occupied by an another process or not. If it is occupied by an another process, it will show the process id of that process.

there are some lines with password decrypt however I don't believe its real reason, for now.

I suspect some other sw is installed on machine, who is occupying the port. For test, you might change binding to other port in server.xml line 60 and test if connect starts on alternative port. As always, do the backup of config file, before touching it. 

Hope you get your issue resolved!

Petr

[Svetlozara]

Hi @PetrH ,

Thank you for the guidance and the hints. Colleagues were able to install the latest patches on the server and the app works. The problem was really that the port was busy and the application could not start.

Kind Regards,

Svetlozara