CIM Closes Automatically

[Ayman Altounji]

I have been experiencing an odd problem with CIM. When I arrive into work in the morning, the CIM is CLOSED (the application is no longer running) without anyone shutting it down. I have found that this situation only occurs on nights when Veritas' Backup-Exec v8.0 sends a trap to CIM indicating a backup failed. By CIM's logs, I am able to determine that the program closes sometime between 1am and 4am, but times vary. The backup starts at 1am. Does anyone know if ANY traps can CLOSED CIM? Does Veritas' program send out a spike to close it? Can CIM be closed by any type of hacker-spike who may not want the program open? Can/does CIM close itself if it encounters problems or too many traps sent to it? Since I know Veritas's program send a trap every 15 minutes to indicate a backup has failed, I am able to determine approx. (within 15 minutes) of when CIM closes. But since CIM does not keep a log of when it's closed, just when it's started, I don't know if it is closing normally or abnormally. Please help. This situation has been quite an adventure! Thanks!

[Ayman Altounji]

I have never noticed anything shutting down CIM other than being out of System Resources - but that would have been a Dr. Watson-like stoppage. also never heard of such a type of trap that could (properly) stop any application.

However, I have noticed that when CIM shuts down it writes something to the CIM20.INI file in my \WINNT directory, perhaps the locations of its windows. If the app is shutting down properly, the date/time of that file would tell you exactly when it happened.

What OS is CIM running on? Were other apps running at the time on the same machine (and still running when you got there in the morning)?

[Ayman Altounji]

Good idea. I will check the CIM20.INI next time this situation occurs to determine if the shutdown is "normal." I do not receive any errors or annomalies on the Windows NT 4 SP5 Proliant DL380 system running CIM, just that the program is closed -- that's what makes this odd. I have two other programs running simultaneously, both of which are still running in the morning, and those program's log files don't indicate anything odd at all. Although I don't know if there is a resource problem at the exact moment of shutdown, NT logs indicate nothing out of the ordinary and other (more intense) programs are still running -- causing me to believe someone/something found a way to kill the CIM process. But why?

[Ayman Altounji]

I had the same experience with one version of CIM console. Can't remember which one but 4.9 seems just fine. If you aren't running the latest, try updating.

[Ayman Altounji]

OK, here's what I found out... My CIM20.INI file is NOT being wirtten to when I find the application closed in the morning (the cim.exe file is not running) -- possibly indicating an abnormal termination. This morning I installed the ENGLISH version of CIM v5.0 and rebooted the system. Everything worked fine. However, I decided to force Backup-Exec to fail to see if v5 terminates as well. Surprise! Within 20 minutes of returning to the server CIM was closed, exited, terminated. I did this twice this morning with the same result - closed in less than 20 minutes -- and the CIM20.INI date/time stamp is not changed. I have noticed that both during startup and shutdown of CIM the INI file does change. (Other programs running on the system are still running normally even after CIM closure.) Now what? Again, could this be a problem with a trap being sent from Backup-exec? (I even upgraded that software just to be safe). Thanks!

[Ayman Altounji]

Edit - "I have noticed that both during startup and shutdown of CIM <> the INI file does change."