Protection Engine service appears to be running but is not listening on the configured port

Products

• Protection Engine for Cloud Services
• Protection Engine for NAS

Issue/Introduction

After stopping/restarting Symantec Protection Engine (SPE) service, the service appears to be running, however it is not listening on the configured port.  A review of the <SPE_INSTALL_FOLDER>/SymantecProtectionEngineAbortLog.txt shows entries similar to the following.

400 CSAPI failed to initialize : Failed to get virtual definitions from Controller service.
0 Symantec Protection Engine is shutting down; logs may contain more information.

Cause

SPE 9.x introduced "virtual definitions" which allowed a separate "controller" service to handle virus definitions updates instead of the SPE process.  If the port used by the "controller" service is already in use, then the "controller" service and SPE will be unable to communicate causing the errors noted above.

Resolution

Disabling the "virtual definitions" will cause the SPE service to handle virus definition updates and will disable the "controller" service. The "virtual definitions" can be disabled by performing the following steps:

1. Log in to the CLI of the SPE
2. Navigate to the <SPE_INSTALL_FOLDER>
3. Issue the following command:
   

   xmlmodifier -s /configuration/Resources/System/VirtualHome/@enabled false configuration.xml

4. Restart the SPE service