Crash on amswsigscan.exe and Signature Scan with ERROR state

Products

• CA Client Automation - IT Client Manager
• CA Client Automation

Issue/Introduction

Signature Scan shows ERROR state for a large group of machines (this could happen for Scalability Servers and even the Domain Manager itself) and Event Viewer shows a crash of amswsigscan.exe:

Recreating 'uam' folder and forcing a full recollection of inventory is not solving the issue.

Environment

Client Automation 14.5 and above

Cause

Looking at the TRC_AMAGENT log of the machine that has the issue, the following can be seen:

|amagent         |SVCSPECS.CPP        |000463|INFO   |  - amsoftscan.exe -i "C:\Program Files (x86)\CA\DSM\Agent\units\00000001\uam\\" -o amsoft.dat -n -it 300
|amagent         |SVCSPECS.CPP        |000463|INFO   | Scanner run finished.
|amagent         |SVCSPECS.CPP        |000463|INFO   | Scanner returned error code 6. Performing signature & delta checks.
|amagent         |SVCSPECS.CPP        |000463|INFO   | Deleting the existing delta signature files
|amagent         |SVCSPECS.CPP        |000463|INFO   | No delta signature files found
|amagent         |SVCSPECS.CPP        |000463|INFO   | Deleting the existing delta intellisigs
|amagent         |SVCSPECS.CPP        |000463|INFO   | No delta intellisigs found
|amagent         |SVCSPECS.CPP        |000463|INFO   | Searching for intellisig error file
|amagent         |SVCSPECS.CPP        |000463|INFO   | Error performing one or more software inventory tasks. Updating statuses.

Log UAM_AMSOFTSCAN shows the following:

|AM Software Scan|                    |000000|INFO   | The Process returned -1073741819

|cfUtilities     |cfUtilities         |000000|DETAIL | CFFactory_Unload: unloading CcnfAgentApi (0x6ccf0000)
|amosoftsca|cfUtilities     |cfUtilities         |000000|DETAIL | CFFactory_FreeLibrary: unloading library CcnfAgentApi
|amosoftsca|cfUtilities     |cfUtilities         |000000|DETAIL | CFPorting_FreeLibrary: 6ccf0000
|amosoftsca|                |                    |000000|DETAIL | CExternalClient::Execute: returned: 6
|amosoftsca|                |                    |000000|DETAIL | CSoftwareScan::CollectData: returned: 6
|amosoftsca|AM Software Scan|                    |000000|WARNING| Failed to collect software scanner data

Resolution

Error code 6 generally means that Signature Scan tried to process the Signatures (on the XML file) and failed to do it. THis could be because some of the newly added signatures were bad formed or with some wrong data. The solution is to delete and recreate the recently added signatures, which are probable those who caused the issue.

One way to validate this would be to sort by "Changed" date and filter for "Source" as 'Custom':