Possible causes for missing or different Engine session messages
Issue overview
You may see the “Launcher successfully started the connection, but the engine did not come online in a timely fashion” error as a failure event for a user session.
This specifically means that the Launcher was able to start a remote session, but the Login Enterprise Engine never was able to communicate with the Appliance within that session.
The event will include the Launcher, Connector target, and User Account information.
Troubleshooting
The simplest approach is to manually start a session to this target, from that Launcher, using the specific account referenced. Or if this is happening on all sessions, you can choose any of your test accounts.
When you manually connect, you should see a message like this on the test machine’s desktop, from our Engine, telling you that you are not part of a Test. “No scheduled session could be found on the appliance.” And it will log you off.
If you don’t see this popup, or the message is different, there is a problem.
Possible causes for missing or different Engine session messages
Three broad problems could be happening:
- The Login Enterprise login processor is not correctly configured as a login script. In that case, you will not see any popup. Double-check that you are configured to start LoginPI.Logon.exe as a login script for this user on this machine.
- The desktop was not logged out of the last session. If a session is only disconnected, then the next session will simply reconnect to the existing one. Since it’s a reconnection and not a login, login scripts will not happen. In this case, you will also not see the popup. You can distinguish this problem from option 1 above because option 1 will always happen, but this option will stop happening after you successfully log out of your session.
- The desktop VM does not have network connectivity to your appliance. You will see other errors from the Engine in this case, or you may simply see the test VM logoff. The Engine uses HTTPS to communicate with the Appliance, so you must make sure that the test machine can resolve the Appliance through DNS, and can reach the appliance over HTTPS. The simplest way to verify this is to try to reach the Appliance web UI from the test desktop.
LoginPI.Logon.exe, our login processor, records a log of its actions in %TEMP%\LoginPI\Logs in files called LoginPI.Logon {date} {time}.txt. There you can see if there are problems resolving or reaching the Appliance. In the same directory, Engine {date} {time}.txt may contain additional information in the case where LoginPI.Logon.exe was able to reach the appliance but there was an unexpected error establishing a session.
The Launcher logs won't provide useful information, because the Launcher knows that it successfully started the session. It has no information about what happened inside the session. Similarly, the Appliance logs won’t have any information about the session either. All the Appliance knows is that the session did not successfully reach out to the Appliance.
The normal sequence of a session login is this:
- Appliance decides to start a User Session.
- The Launcher receives instructions from the Appliance and initiates the remote session.
- User Session login happens.
- LoginPI.Logon.exe runs in the user session and registers the session with the Appliance.
If the session terminates before that final communication happens, you will get a different error, “The launcher's connection to the target ended before the engine became online”.
If the session stays open for 5 minutes but never communicates with the Appliance, you will get the event from this article. Then the Appliance will tell the Launcher to terminate the session. The session will then become disconnected, because we have no way of forcing a logoff if the Engine never ran. An Engine that takes more than 5 minutes to start will induce option 2 above, “The desktop was not logged out of the last session.” So you may have disconnected sessions that are caused by extremely slow login script processing, for instance.