After a power outage 1 program in startup folder did not start

[mpooley]

After a power outage the only program in the startup folder on my home server did not start but when i looked at task manager it's process was running?

to be clear in Task manager it was not showing as a running application but program.exe was showing in the processes tab. It was obviously not working properly though as a window to it should have opened.

The program is a Homemade central heating controller written by me and has been running fine on my Home server for over 2 years 24/7 and has recovered from many many power outages in that time.


This is the first time this has ever happened.

The outage was for a few seconds only and my main computer (not the server) which was also running at the time would not restart properly at all and I had to do a system restore to get it to work.

I am going on holiday soon leaving some friends in my house and it would be a major problem if this happened again while I was away.

I can't see that this outage could be different from any other. could it?
a reboot is a reboot surely?

I rebooted manually and all was well so god knows why this time it was different.

should I get a UPS do you think ? if so anyone got a suggestion for a good one.
My server only uses 28w and most of our power cuts are short lived.

any suggestions are appreciated

thanks

Mike

 

[UsernameIssues]

sure, a UPS is a good idea... but picking one can be fun - see this link.

you could write a tool that watches for the other software's window and if it does not see it after some preset amount of time, it tries to restart that app --- if that fails, it restarts the computer.

assuming that the server has a connection to the internet, TeamViewer might let you remotely view/control/reboot it from a smartphone.

 

[mpooley]

sure, a UPS is a good idea... but picking one can be fun - see this link.

you could write a tool that watches for the other software's window and if it does not see it after some preset amount of time, it tries to restart that app --- if that fails, it restarts the computer.

assuming that the server has a connection to the internet, TeamViewer might let you remotely view/control/reboot it from a smartphone.

Hey that's not a bad idea !
I could easily write an app to do that ! why didn't i think of that

ah just had a thought though, the checking app might not start either

I do use Teamviewer though so that's something to think about. I could log on to my server from the Caribbean

thanks

Mike

 

[UsernameIssues]

If the second "watcher app" has no visible windows, it can do it's thing without hanging up on some GUI creation process. If you know how, you can have the "watcher app" run as a service.

I'm no programmer and I only know a little bit about a few programing languages. I do most of my stuff in a scripting language named AutoIt. And most of my stuff has no visible windows. See this post and its videos for more info. AutoIt (or other programming tools) can be used to send you an e-mail if things barf.

I have written stuff where the main program watches for and tries to start or re-start the "watcher app". And the "watcher app" watches for and tries to start or re-start the main program. Between the two of them - they both stay running.

I don't know what could have caused your app to not start all of the way - but as important as that app is, I would set the server's BOIS to have the computer turn on when power is restored and set it to power up the computer each day at a certain time - just in case. (assuming that the BIOS has such settings). And I would go as far as writing/running two watcher apps - each checking in a different way that the main app is running and each app keeping tabs on the other 2.

...but that is just me...

 

[mpooley]

No that sounds very sensible to me.

I am just googling how to make a 'service' in .net to see how hard it is

thanks