Altiris Service (AeXSvc.exe) is unable to start. Shows as 'Starting' state

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

Customer noticed that the Altiris Service (AeXSvc.exe) is unable to start. When looking on the Services, it appears as "Starting" state. Rebooting the Server itself doesn't help.

You may notice in the System Event logs the following entry:
"The Altiris Service service hung on starting."

OR

"The Altiris Client Message Dispatcher service depends on the Altiris Service service which failed to start because of the following error: 
After starting, the service hung in a start-pending state."

As well, when looking on the NS logs, the following entry was noticed:

10/20/2013 8:38:33 PM	Altiris.Web.NS.Agent.Global.Application_Error	w3wp.exe	125
System.IO.IOException (mscorlib): There is not enough space on the disk. ..

 

 

Environment

ITMS 7.x, 8.x

Cause

This issue was caused by the lack of disk space (in this specific scenario was the C drive). It caused that the CoreSettings.config to be corrupted. When the SMP processes tried to update/access the CoreSettings.config file, because the lack of disk space, the file was recreated as a blank file.

Resolution

Try the following steps:

1. Stop all Altiris Services (in this case you may need to kill them via Task Manager)
2. Go to C:/ProgramData/Symantec/SMP/Settings/
3. Rename CoreSettings.config to something like CoreSettings.Config.OLD
4. Find CoreSettings.config.backup and copy it and name it CoreSettings.config
5. Restart all services