what is dsac.exe.config

Question

I have a windows service installed on a machine running Windows 2008 which automatically stops every night between 2300-0100 hrs. In the eventviewer I get "dsac.exe.config" file changed. Apart from this I also get the below error in event viewer:

The description for Event ID 1001 from source Windows Error Reporting cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

0 CLR20r3 Not available 0 wsbestfarefinder.exe 337.0.0.0 4d8b67b0 Ttl.BestFareFinder.Harvester 337.0.0.0 4d8b67af 301 6 System.TypeInitialization C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue\AppCrash_wsbestfarefinder_74e68497d40658e979de885388289e269c39c_c41e675c 0 9a6e7446-661e-11e0-9ac4-005056bc2f52 4

The handle is invalid

Answer 1

Based on KB article 2462585,

Active Directory Administrative Center (Dsac.exe) to manage Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) objects

That suggests that between those times, something is changing the .config file for dsac.exe. Whether this is relevant to your service or not is something that I suspect is unlikely. You can try to determine this though.

In your development/test/staging environment (you do have one, or all of those, right? :) start your service running and then change the dsac.exe.config file. Does this cause your service to stop? If yes, work out what's causing it to be changed in your production environment.

All that said, I don't think the change to dsac.exe.config is the issue, or at best it's a symptom and not the cause Your service is encountering an exception, specifically a TypeInitializationException at some point in the night. You need to improve your logging and exception handling to get to the root cause of this. Start by hooking the AppDomain.UnhandledException event, logging any exceptions and ensuring that you ship .pdb files with your service.