ADS won't stop, used task manager still won't stop - sql-server

I am not an IT person but I have to play one at work sometimes. I was about to run diagnostics on our EHR which I do weekly, I always stop the ADS and restart it before running the diagnostics. When I went to stop it this time I got an error box that said operation complete which I've gotten before but the box to restart it never came back, I tried to close it and it said not responding. After waiting 10-15 minutes I used the task manager to end ADS. Now when I try to restart it it says it can't because there is another instance running. When I look in the task manager under service the ADS says stopping and has said that for at least 30 minutes now.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you

Related

Automated task using pymssql runs fine during the day- but not at night; why?

I have a web scraping job that needs to be executed each evening. Our company has a virtual machine with the "Windows Task Manager" application installed. So, I created a new task (i.e., an entry in task manager) to run every evening at 3 a.m.
Initially, the process did exactly as expected: it fetched the data and inserted them into our database. A few nights later, the website we were scraping from kept shutting down for maintenance, so I went into Task Manager, changed the time setting to start at 10:30 pm instead of 3:00 a.m., and waited until the next morning.
The script executed completely with no exception issues- but nothing was entered into the database! The task manager even said that the script ran completely, and it even took the usual amount of time to run, but alas, no new rows.
One might posit that there was no new data to fetch. However, When I execute the script manually from the command line (and kept the start date/end date the same), the script uploaded the usual ~10,000 rows into the database. So there is data- but it only gets written to the database when we launch the script manually during the day, and not when scheduled in the evening.
Does anyone know a potential reason as to why this happens?
Thank you in advance.
Edited to add:
I understand that this question might sound a little ridiculous, especially since from the surface, there doesn't seem to be a lone factor in determining the issue. If I could provide any further background information into the issue, feel free to ask.

VB6+Access(ADO/JET) Randomly getting "Disk or Network Error" or "Cannot find the input table or query X on Database Y"

We have a Practice Management system that is about 15 years old. I've been working on it for about 12, and I've never encountered this problem until just recently, and we can't figure it out.
It is written in VB6 which uses ADO/JET to access an Access .mdb file on the network. The application opens the connection when it starts, keeps it open while it's open, and closes it when it exits. It does a LOT of stuff with the DB - the system deals with Patient Accounts, Charges, Payments, Scheduling Appointments, and about a million other things. We have dozens of clients that use this program, each with their own DB and most of them 'offsite', where they have their own server, some number of workstations, between 1 and 20 users, pounding away at the system 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and except for the occasional DB field bug or having to compact/repair DBs, it's pretty stable.
About 3 weeks ago, we started seeing a problem that we hadn't seen before.
We have an 'in-house' system setup for us to use: the DB is on our Server which houses maybe 10 other DBs, and only a couple of people connect in to this system.
We started noticing that if someone logged into the system, went straight to our Scheduler screen, and then sat idle for about 5-10 minutes, they might get "Disk or Network Error", or "Cannot find the input table or query X on database Y".
What's strange is that it SEEMS to happen only when 2 or more people are logged into that DB from different computers, and then one of them will get the error (Randomly?) but the other 2 users will be fine.
There is a Timer on the 'main' MDI Parent form of the system which wakes up about ever minute (there are some things which will change the interval to a shorter interval, and there are some things which disable the timer, but we don't think either of them are happening in this situation). It performs a pretty basic SQL Query on the DB: SELECT loggedin FROM Users WHERE UserId = 'DBUPDATER' THIS is the SQL Query that seems to be ALWAYS triggering one of those errors.
There is also a timer that runs about every 2 minutes while a user is logged in to check for emails and a few other things that would be running during this time.
And since they are on the Scheduler screen, there's a timer on there that runs every 30s or so which will check the DB to see if any changes to the scheduler have been made to see if it needs to refresh the screen or not.
There are some other strange things:
The DB and the Users table seem to be perfectly fine. When the person who gets the error logged into the system - usually only 5 minutes earlier - the system HAD to look at the Users table to mark them as Logged in, and I'm almost 100% sure that the query that it's dying on had been run at least once - probably 4-5 times before it dies.
Once a user gets this error, if they leave the Error's MessageBox on the screen (not quit the .exe), if they try to access that DB file in any way, they get "Disk or Network error" - this includes if they try to open that DB in Access. HOWEVER, they can still get to the Network just fine, and even open up other mdb files IN THE SAME FOLDER as the one they can't open. OTHER PEOPLE on other computers can open that mdb without any errors. Once the user acknowledges the Error, and allow the exe to close, they can open that DB file again just fine.
I'm told that this is not in anyway a Network issue. Our IT guy says he's run pings and traces and all sorts of tests to ensure that the network connection is not getting dropped.
I've also run some things on the DB to make sure it's not corrupted and it seems to be fine - and we get it to happen on other DBs.
If anyone has seen anything like this and knows a possible fix, I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks!
New Information (9/5/13 - 10:30am)
We noticed that at the same time we get this error, in the errorlog on the computer that gets the error is a Warning Event that says:
{Delayed Write Failed} Windows was unable to save all the data for the file \MEDTECHSERVER\MEDTECH DATA\VB\SCHEDTEST2\MEDTECH.MDB; the data has been lost. This error was returned by the server on which the file exists. Please try to save this file elsewhere.

receive an alert when job is *not* running

I know how to set up a job to alert when it's running.
But I'm writing a job which is meant to run many times a day, and I don't want to be bombarded by emails, but rather I'd like a solution where I get an alert when the job hasn't been executed for X minutes.
This can be acheived by setting the job to alert on execution, and then setting up some process which checks for these alerts, and warns when no such alert is seen for X minutes.
I'm wondering if anyone's already implemented such a thing (or equivalent).
Supporting multiple jobs with different X values would be great.
The danger of this approach is this: suppose you set this up. One day you receive no emails. What does this mean?
It could mean
the supposed-to-be-running job is running successfully (and silently), and so the absence-of-running monitor job has nothing to say
or alternatively
the supposed-to-be-running job is NOT running successfully, but the absence-of-running monitor job has ALSO failed
or even
your server has caught fire, and can't send any emails even if it wants to
Don't seek to avoid receiving success messages - instead devise a strategy for coping with them. Because the only way to know that a job is running successfully is getting a message which says precisely this.

Google App Engine Task Queue

I have a task queue with several tasks. If I delete a particular task from Admin Console, it disappears from the task queue but GAE doesnt terminate it. The task is still being executed in the background.
Is this a common behavior ?
Yeah, I see the same behavior. Seems you can only delete pending tasks from the admin console. Once they've started they continue to run until they finish or hit an exception (could be as long as 10 minutes with the new update).
I've noticed they don't stop on version upgrades either, which is a little weird if you aren't expecting it... if the task takes a long time you end up with handlers running in two versions of the app simultaneously. It makes sense though.

Scheduling a RichCopy Jobs

Anyone use the timer feature of RichCopy? I have a job that works fine when I manually start the job. However, when I schedule the job and click run, the app appears to be waiting for the scheduled time to elapse yet never fires. Interesting enough when I stop the job the copy starts.
Anyone have any experience with using RichCopy timer?
IanB
Try created a batch file with command line options. Then use windows scheduler to launch the batch.
OMBG (Bill Gates) You need to read and get security policy and the respect it has to place on a hierarchy of upstream objects and credentials. Well that's the MS answer and attitude...
The reality is if you are working with server OSs you need to understand their security & policy frameworks, and how to debug them :). If your process loses the necessary file permissions or rights (2 different things) you should ask: "Hot damn, why didn't I fix that in the config/setup". People that blast the vendor/project (or even ####&$! MS) are just blinding themselves to the solution/s.
In most cases this kind of issue is due to Windows' AD removing the rights of a Local administrator User to run a scheduled task. It is a common security setting in corporate networks (implemented with glee by Domain Admins to upset developers) though it is really a default setting these days. It happens because the machine updates against an upstream policy (after you've scheduled a task) and decides that all of a sudden it won't trust you to run it (even though previously it let you set it up). In a perfect world it wouldn't let you set it up in the first place, but that isn't the way policy applies in Windows... (####&$! MS). LOL
Wow it only took 5 months to get an answer! (but here they are for the next person at least!)

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