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safix01's avatar
safix01
Helpful | Level 6
8 years ago

DbxSvc ID 320

Hi, In Event Manager, every second it shows " Failed to connect to the driver: -2147024894, retrying in 1000 milliseconds¨ ID:320 (DbxSvc). Is there an update error or something else? Thank you! ...
Setting up the apps
  • Ross_S's avatar
    Ross_S
    8 years ago
    Hi all,
     
    First: Many apologies for the delay in jumping in here, I wanted to make sure I had a concrete update for you all.
     
    So, for context: What is Dbxsvc? :
     
    I've added a section to the help center article: https://www.dropbox.com/help/business/smart-sync (I say section, it's more of a note at the bottom under the driver FAQ).
     
    The file dbxsvc.exe is a file that we use to install the Smart Sync driver. Should you not be a business user, or not have Smart Sync, then this file will never start operating. It is, however, created at install for all users so if you are not a Smart Sync this file will still appear there.
     
    I see we have a number of pretty interesting, creative suggestions on how to disable, coupled with queries if it's safe to disable it. I'm of course not going to endorse a process that disables part of our software, should a feature or functionality cause user pain then we would want to know. Fixability and timeframes can vary depending on the in-depth technical nature of the problem.
    Should you decide to disable it with one of the solutions here, it will prevent the smart sync feature from working in some cases. We need the service to update the driver, as well as to establish new driver<->client connections. This is the services current functionality. Additional functionality could be added over time. My main concern around anyone disabling it is that in the future you may need this process, Smart Sync won't work correctly, you can reach out to support but this custom change you've made will be hard for us to diagnose as the root cause of whatever issue you experience.
     
     
    Why is it failing to connect / what's going wrong?:
     
    It should be failing to connect. This is by design, the actual issue you’re facing is due to the frequency we're writing to the logs. To address any concerns around error with the application, these errors are in no way indicative of a software issue and do not point to any issues with backing up you data. Because it fails to connect, Windows treats this as a trigger to write to the log. Your data is safe, this process is just used to install a driver. As covered in the above section we expect it to do what you are seeing.
     
    With that in mind, we understand that some of you do wish to see this behaviour.
     
     
    Why aren't we fixing this?:
     
    We are, we take our user feedback very seriously and we have spent many hours working on this. As fixes have many dependencies, and are just one components of a version release, I'm always reluctant to jump onto a thread and give a firm release date for a fix as these are regularly subject to change.
    You may have noticed that we took the original connection attempt frequency down from every 1 second to every minute. This was an improvement we took onboard based on the feedback you've supplied here and also via other channels. Our new release, 31.3.15, has further improved this, the process will run 3 times daily. This should reduce the errors written to the logs and not clutter the report.
     
    The new beta version is the first to include a fix:
     
GlenGordon's avatar
GlenGordon
New member | Level 2

For anyone who might care about more of the technical details of what's going on, I may be able to add a few puzzle pieces.

I did some looking around in 

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Dropbox\Client\driver_amd64"

and in particular at the dbx.inf file that's used for installing dbx.sys and the dbx_svc.exe service for controlling it.

The dbx.sys driver is a Hierarchical Storage Manager filter driver which my limited Googling reveals is related to sending and retrieving seldom used files to/from slower/offline storage.

There's code in dbx_svc.exe to start/stop the  dbx.sys driver (FilterLoad/ FilterUnload calls).

At least on my system, the driver is never started (perhaps it's supposed to be started conditionally) but then the dbx_svc.exe unconditionally trys to communicate with it.

 

I now feel very comfortable stopping the dbx_svc service discussed in other answers but also changing the start type of the service to Disabled which should keep it from starting the next time I boot. (Let's hope there isn't some other Dropbox process that has the privileges to change the start type back to automatic.)

 

 

forcefx2's avatar
forcefx2
New member | Level 2
8 years ago

I ran a quick powershell to disable this service. 

get-service -Name dbx | Stop-Service -NoWait |Set-Service -StartupType Disabled;get-service -Name dbx

  • ner0's avatar
    ner0
    Helpful | Level 5
    8 years ago
    forcefx2 wrote:

    I ran a quick powershell to disable this service. 

    get-service -Name dbx | Stop-Service -NoWait |Set-Service -StartupType Disabled;get-service -Name dbx

    THIS! Thanks.

     

    Also an alternative, run from an elevated cmd prompt:

    sc stop DbxSvc & sc config DbxSvc start=disabled


    To Dropbox devs reading: you are pitiful.

    • Ross_S's avatar
      Ross_S
      Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
      8 years ago
      Hi all,
       
      First: Many apologies for the delay in jumping in here, I wanted to make sure I had a concrete update for you all.
       
      So, for context: What is Dbxsvc? :
       
      I've added a section to the help center article: https://www.dropbox.com/help/business/smart-sync (I say section, it's more of a note at the bottom under the driver FAQ).
       
      The file dbxsvc.exe is a file that we use to install the Smart Sync driver. Should you not be a business user, or not have Smart Sync, then this file will never start operating. It is, however, created at install for all users so if you are not a Smart Sync this file will still appear there.
       
      I see we have a number of pretty interesting, creative suggestions on how to disable, coupled with queries if it's safe to disable it. I'm of course not going to endorse a process that disables part of our software, should a feature or functionality cause user pain then we would want to know. Fixability and timeframes can vary depending on the in-depth technical nature of the problem.
      Should you decide to disable it with one of the solutions here, it will prevent the smart sync feature from working in some cases. We need the service to update the driver, as well as to establish new driver<->client connections. This is the services current functionality. Additional functionality could be added over time. My main concern around anyone disabling it is that in the future you may need this process, Smart Sync won't work correctly, you can reach out to support but this custom change you've made will be hard for us to diagnose as the root cause of whatever issue you experience.
       
       
      Why is it failing to connect / what's going wrong?:
       
      It should be failing to connect. This is by design, the actual issue you’re facing is due to the frequency we're writing to the logs. To address any concerns around error with the application, these errors are in no way indicative of a software issue and do not point to any issues with backing up you data. Because it fails to connect, Windows treats this as a trigger to write to the log. Your data is safe, this process is just used to install a driver. As covered in the above section we expect it to do what you are seeing.
       
      With that in mind, we understand that some of you do wish to see this behaviour.
       
       
      Why aren't we fixing this?:
       
      We are, we take our user feedback very seriously and we have spent many hours working on this. As fixes have many dependencies, and are just one components of a version release, I'm always reluctant to jump onto a thread and give a firm release date for a fix as these are regularly subject to change.
      You may have noticed that we took the original connection attempt frequency down from every 1 second to every minute. This was an improvement we took onboard based on the feedback you've supplied here and also via other channels. Our new release, 31.3.15, has further improved this, the process will run 3 times daily. This should reduce the errors written to the logs and not clutter the report.
       
      The new beta version is the first to include a fix:
       
      • mmillennial's avatar
        mmillennial
        New member | Level 2
        8 years ago
        So it's an issue you know about, caused by something you know about, and instead of maybe adding an option during setup to disable features for business users, you're just reducing the number of times that a completely baffling Event Log entry gets logged? That's the biggest kludge I've ever heard of. What a joke!

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