Service Administration

The Otter Service is a key component of Otter's high-availability architecture, and is responsible for executing scripts, communicating with agents/servers, and performing other background tasks.

It's a standard Windows Service Application, and can be managed and configured using the Windows Service Manager or sc.exe as you see fit.

Service Configuration

By default, the Otter Service is named INEDOOTTERSVC, runs under the NetworkService account, and is granted Read, Write, and ListDirectory privileges to the following paths, as defined in Advanced Settings:

• Extensions.CommonCachePath
• Extensions.ExtensionsPath
• Extensions.BuiltInExtensionsPath
• System.ServiceTempPath
• System.WebTempPath

Managing the Service from the Web Application

In addition to stopping, starting, and restarting (on Windows only) the Otter Service, you can view live logs from the service; this can be helpful in diagnosing problems or working with Inedo's support team to track down unexpected behavior or bugs.

• For distributed installations (load balanced / high availability), you'll need to configure the service messenger to work over a network connection instead of a local pipe.
• If you're seeing "The Otter web application does not have sufficient privileges to query the service status", see KB#1090: Granting Service Control Privileges for Inedo Product’s Web Applications for instructions on how to resolve the message.

Task Runners

Task runners perform well-defined background tasks, either on a periodic and/or manual basis. Many create subtasks that allow you to better see what the service is doing. Some task runners can be triggered manually. This should only be necessary for debugging purposes, as the Web Application will trigger them in response to certain actions (e.g. adding a connector) and they are always executed when the service is started.

• ServerCheckerTimedExecuter - this runs every hour, performs a lightweight handshake on each remote agent, and upgrades the agent as needed
• JobDispatcherTimedExecuter - this runs every minute, checks for scheduled jobs, and executes those jobs as needed
• RoutineConfigurationTimedExecuter - this runs every hour (you can change this with RoutineConfigurationExecutionThrottle in All Settings), and executes configuration plans for all severs
• UpdateCheckerTimedExecuter - this runs every six hours (you disable this with Updates.PerformUpdateChecks in All Settings), and communicates with inedo.com for an updated version of the sofftware

Otter.Service.exe CLI

The Otter.Service.exe also contains a command line interface (CLI) to reset the admin account, manage the integrated web server, manually install the service, and can be run interactively for debugging purposes.

The CLI commands are: