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SafeExamBrowser / seb-win-refactoring

Safe Exam Browser for Windows.
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Session Start Problem: "Communication channel has faulted!" #824

Open vroosioks opened 5 months ago

vroosioks commented 5 months ago

We have the same problem at one school. Some computers (Windows 11) have SEB running, others have a message "SEB failed to start new session". Computer restart doesn't help. The school installed program from https://safeexambrowser.org/download_en.html and then also manually installed the necessary programs from this page requirement section https://github.com/SafeExamBrowser/seb-win-refactoring/releases/tag/v3.6.0.

2024-03-04_12h34m29s_Client.log 2024-03-04_12h34m29s_Runtime.log error1

I think there's been a similar problem here, but I don't think it's worked out. https://github.com/SafeExamBrowser/seb-win-refactoring/issues/555

Originally posted by @vroosioks in https://github.com/SafeExamBrowser/seb-win-refactoring/discussions/806#discussioncomment-8671660

vroosioks commented 5 months ago

The school has 2 types of computers, SEB 3.6.0 worked on Lenovo computers (picture 1) and did not work on HP computers (picture 2). Pic 1 lenovo_programs Pic 2 hp_programs

lenovo-hp-wmic.xlsx

dbuechel commented 5 months ago

Thanks for your report. This is indeed a known issue for which we currently don't have a solution:

2024-03-04 12:34:33.876 [01] - INFO: Initializing runtime connection...
2024-03-04 12:34:33.894 [01] - DEBUG: [RuntimeProxy] Trying to connect to endpoint 'net.pipe://localhost/safeexambrowser/runtime/4b93e454-bf92-49f4-aa16-9fba36ca2092' with authentication token 'caf42f93-6d10-49a5-89e6-9b30989298e3'...
2024-03-04 12:34:33.924 [01] - DEBUG: [RuntimeProxy] Communication channel is opening...
2024-03-04 12:34:33.950 [01] - WARNING: [RuntimeProxy] Communication channel has faulted!
2024-03-04 12:34:33.971 [01] - WARNING: [RuntimeProxy] Endpoint 'net.pipe://localhost/safeexambrowser/runtime/4b93e454-bf92-49f4-aa16-9fba36ca2092' could not be found!
2024-03-04 12:34:33.971 [01] - ERROR: Failed to connect to the runtime. Aborting startup...

Our current suspicion is an interference of either Windows (Defender) or then a third-party application like anti-virus software or alike. But we'd need a reliable way to reproduce the issue, otherwise there's nothing we can do at the moment, various attempts at determining the underlying cause have thus far failed.

dbuechel commented 5 months ago

I see that you have Bitdefender installed; you might want to try and disable it on the systems with the problem to verify whether it may be interfering with SEB. Or you could uninstall all software which is on the HP systems, but not on the Lenovo systems in an attempt to pin down a possible interference with SEB.

github-actions[bot] commented 4 months ago

This issue is stale because it has been open for 28 days with no activity. It will soon be closed automatically if there are no updates.

frederik-it commented 3 months ago

I hope someone will read this, because I mentioned this issue probably as first in https://github.com/SafeExamBrowser/seb-win-refactoring/issues/765 Even SEB 3.7 has the same error as I've described in previous link: SEBDummy can't be changed. I suppose the start of the problem has to do with some actions that couldn't be done even if I'm the administrator of the device, because it's also managed by Intune. Because I read Antivirus. We're using Defender for Endpoint, the cloud solution by Microsoft. It isn't possible to turn it off... Some devices have this problem, while many others doesn't. But SEB has to work on all devices. Hopefully SEB could fix this. Thanks!

dbuechel commented 3 months ago

@frederik-it This issue relates to another problem, namely the inter-process communication of SEB's application components and does not relate to the ease of access configuration issue.

With respect to the issue mentioned in #765, I can only reiterate the information already provided in comments https://github.com/SafeExamBrowser/seb-win-refactoring/issues/765#issuecomment-1858110326 and https://github.com/SafeExamBrowser/seb-win-refactoring/issues/765#issuecomment-1888900444: If you're not using the SEB Service application component, then SEB will not manipulate the ease of access registry value (but will validate it, which is likely the cause of your issue). Thus please try to bypass the service component in your configuration(s) and clean up any potentially remaining ease of access registry values (either manually via Registry Editor or then e.g. using the SEB Reset Utility).

frederik-it commented 3 months ago

Hi, thanks for the answer. I thought it was about the same issue. Now I did some investment in some of these laptops having the problem with SEBDummy. I've noticed after some searching that there was an underlying service installed on these devices, that acted as an antivirus. Probably it was installed with some other software. So the problem of my school has been fixed. Thank you to say in these posts to look for an antivirus or something similar. So Defender for Endpoint is working good with SEB.

dbuechel commented 3 months ago

@frederik-it Excellent, that is good to know and thank you for providing the information, it may help other users.