Endpoint Protection Manager database validation tool produces unexpected results

Products

• Endpoint Protection

Issue/Introduction

The Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager (SEPM) contains a tool "dbvalidator.bat" in the "Tools" subfolder of where the SEPM is installed. The tool can help identify issues and broken links in the SEPM database. Once finished the tool will produce a "dbvalidator.log" file in the "tomcat\logs" subfolder.

This article specifies steps to take if the dbvalidator.bat tool does not complete, fails to produce a dbvalidator.log file or produces an unexpectedly small log file.

 

If the tool is executed from command line, the result could error with java.lang.OutOfMemory.

 

Other return results may include an output file that is not created or reaches the maximum size, which causes the tool to rollover and start overwriting itself resulting in a smaller than expected log.

Cause

Depending on the size of the objects in the database that the dbvalidator needs to process, it can potentially run out of java memory or produce a log file that is larger than the 10MB limit where the SEPM will truncate and roll over tomcat log files.

 

Resolution

• Log truncation
  If the tomcat\logs\dbvalidator.log file contains just a few lines, and does not start with an "INFO: logger initialized ..." message, then the log file it produced may have been over the 10MB limit where SEPM truncates and rolls over tomcat log files.
  There are two possible workarounds:
  • Open the "tomcat\etc\conf.properties" file, and at the end add the line scm.log.logsize=50000000 to increase the limit to 50MB. The SEPM service needs to be restarted for this to take affect.
  • From a CMD prompt, use the 2> pipe (">2" instead of ">" to pipe stderr instead of stdout) to direct the output to a file. The command would be:
    dbvalidator.bat 2> dbvalidator.log
    This will only work on the pre-RU3 dbvalidator.bat which calls "%JAVA_HOME%\bin\java.exe" instead of "%SESM_BIN%\JavaLaunchTool.exe".

• OutOfMemoryError
  When run from a CMD prompt (rather than double-clicking the batch file), if the dbvalidator tool outputs a java.lang.OutOfMemory error message, then attempt to tune the java memory parameters on line 13 in the batch file. Replace "-Xms256m -Xmx256m" with "-Xms512m -Xmx512m" or an even higher value such as  "-Xms1024m -Xmx1024m" if needed.