ASP.NET State Service disabled again by Automatic Updates

November 16, 2005 • 11 comments

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Man, this really pisses me off. I ran the monthly patches on my server today. And once again the ASP.NET State Service has been reset to Manual startup by this process.

It seems like every month I have to go into my site and change the freaking ASP.NET State Service’s settings to automatic from manual. It seems that every one of the Microsoft monthly Patches against Windows 2003 Server re-set the State Service settings.

Why the heck can’t Microsoft respect the settings that I have set up on my machine instead of continuously fucking with it? What business does a service pack or any kind of installer changing a setting of a RUNNING service?

I’m aware of the issue since it’s happened every month, but of course when I’m doing the updates I don’t immediately think of it. So, most of my sites start up and immediately start spewing errors due to the lack of the state service… I find out soon enough and if I’m lucky it’s not from a pissed off customer’s email, but from my error logs.

It's bad enough for my own apps, but I'm thinking about some of my apps installed at customers which won't know what those error messages mean.

This truly sucks… I'm going to have to rethink the use of State Service if this keeps going on.

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The Voices of Reason

Gabe
November 16, 2005

# re: ASP.NET State Service disabled again by Automatic Updates

I use Windows Server 2K3 on both my servers and my laptop and have not experienced this problem. I have the state service set to automatic and updates have never changed this (knock on wood). I'm guessing it may be something deeper than just the automatic updates. Note that I update manaually by going to windowsupdate and not be using the built in service.

Bob Archer
November 16, 2005

# re: ASP.NET State Service disabled again by Automatic Updates

Why are you using the state service? Are you clustering? If you are going to take the serialize/deserialize hit on your state objects anyway you might as well use SQL server for state.

Rick Strahl
November 16, 2005

# re: ASP.NET State Service disabled again by Automatic Updates

Bob,

Lots of reasons why I'm not using InProc sessions:

http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/1986.aspx

State Server is considerably more efficient than SQL Server sessions.

Rick Strahl
November 16, 2005

# re: ASP.NET State Service disabled again by Automatic Updates

Gabe,

I have this issue on both my laptop and my server. Any new patch install that messes witht the .NET framework causes the State Service to get disabled (well, set to manual).

Last update was SP1 and exactly the same thing happened. Not 100% sure of the update in between. SP1 as you might recall updated the .NET framework to 1.1. This update updated .NET 1.0 to SP3. I'm guessing it has to do with with any version of the .NET framework being updated.

Nic Wise
November 16, 2005

# re: ASP.NET State Service disabled again by Automatic Updates

I'm 99% sure that the last round of updates a) killed activeX's on my server (known "bug" with the october round of patches) and b) disabled or rather, broke remote desktop. I had to turn it off, turn it back on, and reboot, which is not fun when it's a headless box in a closet.

:(

Nic

Gabe
November 17, 2005

# re: ASP.NET State Service disabled again by Automatic Updates

I didn't start using the state service until after SP1 so I can't confirm wether or not that update will disable it. I can see how an update to the framework might do that. THe regular windows updates once a month do not. Interstingly I can confirm that when installing the .NET framework 2.0 runtime on my boxes that it upgraded the state server to a 2.x version and left it set to automatic.

Rick Strahl
November 18, 2005

# re: ASP.NET State Service disabled again by Automatic Updates

I know that SP1 definitely did it both on my live server and my laptop. I think it has to be a major update to any of the .NET frameworks installed to do this, but even so it seems absolutely silly that a service should become disabled by any sort of update.

Micah LaCombe
January 06, 2006

# re: ASP.NET State Service disabled again by Automatic Updates

Hey Rick, I have been scratching my head for a couple days with this one. What sort of solution were you able to come up with?

Rick Strahl
January 06, 2006

# re: ASP.NET State Service disabled again by Automatic Updates

I suppose one solution is to have an error handler that checks of the StateService error and if it's not running restart it.

The catch is you'll need Admin permissions to do it, which an error page is not likely going to have.

FWIW, I haven't had any problems with this anymore so it seems that it's only major updates like an SP and installing a new version of the framework apparently that is causing this sillyness, not just a plain old security update. Of course that may simply be because the normal updates don't touch .NET in any way...

Rick Strahl's Web Log
October 02, 2006

# Why you shouldn't use InProc Session State in ASP.NET - Rick Strahl's Web Log

InProc sessions in ASP.NET are very volatile due to ASP.NET's processing model. While much faster, InProc sessions are very susceptable to unloading which often has nasty results for the users on your site. Here's a summary of some of the ways that InProc session can unload.

mark
July 28, 2007

# re: ASP.NET State Service disabled again by Automatic Updates

Same here..not only does it do this but I think this hotfix KB933854 even resets the KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\aspnet_state\Parameter
s\AllowRemoteConnection from 1 to 0. That sucks....maybe its time for ScaleOutSoftware.com

Rick Strahl's Weblog