Custom agent service not starting on Windows 2003 SP2 64bit

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Using Agent Builder tool you can produce custom agents for any platform you likes, including of course the different flavors of MS Windows.

In one of my most recent experiences with this tool, I dealt with a custom agent defined to excute a simple script on windows.
The agent was built for Windows 64 bit because the target system was a Windows 2003 SP2 64bit.

Once installed and configured, the agent was never able to start.
When the service was started, it just returned message:
"The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion" in the Windows event log.

No RAS1 logs were created and nothing else was available into ITMHOME log files concerning this custom agent.

What to do in this case to understand why the service does not complete initialization ?
The quickest option is to look for the process executable name and launch it using the TEST flag.

So in case the binary name is k23agent.exe, from a command prompt, go to tmaitm6_x64:  
   
cd c:\ibm\itm\tmaitm6_x64  

and then executes the agent binary with this syntax:  
   
k23agent.exe TEST  
   
The TEST keyword runs the ITM agents in debugging mode into the console.  
Under normal conditions, it should stay running and write nothing.

In this specific case instead I was showed an error window.

As soon as the k23agent.exe tries to start, it immediately fails with:  
"The procedure entry point CancelIoEx could not be located in the dynamic link library kernel32.dll"  

And this is indeed the root cause of the problem.

The procedure CancelIoEx was not present into the KERNEL32.dll before a certain period (pre-Vista).
So basically also in the failing machine, the file KERNEL32.dll was not including the procedure CancelIoEx and so the agent could not complete initialization.

In order to fix it, theoretically you should look for a newer version of KERNEL32.dll, but considering that Windows 2003 is out of support

since some time, if you really need to run something on this platform, you have to look to a different solution.

A quick test done on a Windows 2003 SP2 32bit with a 32bit version of the agent, revealed that it was instead able to initialize and run fine.

We can consider running the 32bit version of the agent also in Windows 2003 SP2 64bit, as it is anyway supported.

It is for sure safer and quicker than upgrading the operating system just to look for a single function on a single dll file.

Best regards

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