CaiWinA3 agent failed due to maximum system PATH length exceeded.

Products

• CA Workload Automation AE - Business Agents (AutoSys)
• CA Workload Automation AE - Scheduler (AutoSys)
• Workload Automation Agent
• CA Unicenter NSM

Issue/Introduction

Description:

Agents or Services may fail on Windows due to the system exceeding the PATH limit. Most modern Windows versions have a PATH limit of 2048 (including NULL terminating character). Some older versions have a limit of 1024 (or 2048 with patches). If the system is close to or exceeds this limit, awservices components may fail. Some example error messages that may be logged in the awservices.log file:

       [A]-1d20- getMaxPathLen: Max PATH length supported = 2048
       [C]-f94- AWSERVICES: hpaagent:hpaagent is FAIL reason:
       Fail to communicate with: D:\NSM\SharedComponents\CCS\AT\Agents\bin\hpaAgent.exe
       [C]-f94- AWSERVICES: prfagent:prfagent is FAIL reason:
       Fail to communicate with: D:\NSM\SharedComponents\CCS\AT\Agents\bin\prfAgent.exe
       [C]-f94- AWSERVICES: caiWinA3:caiWinA3 is FAIL reason:
       Fail to communicate with: D:\NSM\SharedComponents\CCS\AT\agents\bin\caiWinA3.exe

Please note that these messages may occur for other reasons and do not always indicate a problem with the PATH.

Solution:

Check that the maximum system PATH length has not been exceeded

1. When reviewing, be sure to expand all variables that might be seen in the PATH statement.
   
   For example:

   %SystemRoot%=C:\Windows
   ^    12    ^ ^    10  ^
   
   "%SystemRoot%\system32" counts as 19 characters NOT 21.
   %ProgramFiles%=C:\Program Files
   ^      14    ^ ^      16      ^
   
   "%ProgramFiles%\My Application" counts as 31 characters NOT 29.

2. Make sure that "%PATH%" does not exist within your path statement because this could effectively double the length of the path statement unnecessarily.

To shorten the path

Remove duplicate and unnecessary entries

• Replace long path names with their 8.3 (short) counter parts - For example "C:\Program Files" would become "C:\PROGRA~1" (may be different - check "dir /x" output)
  
  
• If the awservices.log indicates that max path supported is 1024, you may need to patch the system.
  
  Windows 2003 SP1 requires MS hotfix 906469: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906469/
  
  Windows 2003 SP2 or later support a path length of 2048 out of the box.

Environment

Release: TNGEXO05500-11.1-Management-for Microsoft Exchange
Component: