0 of 0 services running, license issue?

[smithed]

Earlier today I was trying out systemlink and at some unknown point it stopped working (well I know when, but I don't know what I was doing). I remoted into the server and opened up the server configuration tool and it said 0 of 0 services were running and had a nice big green check mark to indicate that everything was OK! I tried to restart the services and it restarted the systemlink manager, but nothing else.

I could still connect to the web page, but it only had system management and package management on the home screen, and when I went to system management it had a big red error in the top left indicating that there was a license issue. I checked in license manager that my evaluation period still had 44 days remaining. 

So, with nothing else to try I rebooted my machine. No change.

Then I tried to uninstall and reinstall the teststand report service thing from NI package manager. When I opened the systemlink server config tool it still said 0 of 0 services running with a big green check mark. However, when I hit restart this time round, it 'found' the other services it needed to run and restarted them.

I know its a bit vague, and since its now fixed its hard to say more, but do you have any thoughts on how this could have happened or how to prevent it? How do the systemlink "services" get discovered? Is there a file that gets corrupted that I could take a look at?

If it matters, I work in a FIPS environment which seems to break right around 100% of recent NI stuff for some reason, so I have to disable it after every reboot. However, the issue originated after FIPS had already been disabled.

[JoshuaP]

The configuration files for each service are stored in C:\ProgramData\National Instruments\Skyline\Install\Services\Descriptors.  In addition, we require the RabbitMQ and NI Skyline Service Manager to be running for everything to work. 

If it was reporting 0 or 0 services, you may want to double check that nothing has wiped out that directory and those services are running from the Windows Service Manager.

[smithed]

At the time I had checked that the rabbitmq and skyline manager were both running, so I don't think that was the problem.

I'm assuming the descriptors folder wasn't completely wiped out, because all I did was reinstall the test service -- nothing else. One thing I notice in the descriptors folder is a cache file. Is this something that might have gotten corrupted? Is it safe to try deleting it if I come across this again?

[JoshuaP · Accepted solution]

That is a possibility.  Doing an install, invalidates the cache and forces everything to get updated.  If it happens again, you may want to try stopping the NI Skyline Service Manager.  Delete the _CACHE_ file and then restart the NI Skyline Service Manager.

[smithed]

thanks, I will give that a go if I see this come up again

[smithed · Accepted solution]

Turns out to have been fips. Apparently it gets periodically reset even if the computer doesn't restart, so if I try to restart systemlink after fips gets reenabled, it comes up as perfectly fine with 0 of 0 services running.