ndtrack.exe command line character limit silently prevents options from working

[mfranz]

Hi,

Here is my problem: 

FNMS agent (16.0.1) does not react to some command line options. This happens without an error or any other kind of message.

The situation:

My customer does run kind of a manual inventory, without installing the agent. Instead ndtrack.exe is triggered by scripts. I tried adding an additional option, but it is completely ignored. Other options seem to be ignored as well. The tracker.log lists all my arguments. When I move the new argument to the front of the list of arguments, it suddenly works.

My assumption:

ndtrack.exe has a character limit on the argument string. Looks like it could be 256 chars.

Edit: It is no character limit. It is that incorrectly formatted attributes silently prevent following attributes from working.

My question:

Can please someone check this and let me know if engineering can change the limit? There are so many agent options and this really limits how the agent can be used.

Best regards,

Markward

[ChrisG · Accepted solution]

I can't find or observe any command line length limit (beyond the regular Windows length limit of 8191 characters).

Does the command line have any special characters like quotes or backslashes in there? I've seen misused quoting and escaping causing problems with trailing arguments on command lines being ignored.

[mfranz]

Hi Chris,

I put quotes around all attribute values.

-o Option="Value"

That helped. My takeaways:

1. Quotes are stripped from the program arguments when looking at the tracker.log. So looking at it won't tell you if an option with multiple arguments was processed correctly (e.g. IncludeDirectory).
2. The quotes being provided or not still makes a big difference for the agent, in the sense that following arguments might be ignored.
3. That is happening silently, you still see the whole string of arguments in the tracker log, but you cannot tell directly if they were used. You can still see that stuff is missing, e.g. logs not written, values not included, etc. but no error message.
4. For testing, you can use the LogFile option with a local path at the very end of your attributes string. If the file is not written, it is likely one of the previous attributes is preventing this option from working.

Best regards,

Markward

[mfranz]

Hi Chris,

I'll change the order of the attributes a bit to see if any of them blocks the rest of the string from working.

Best regards,

Markward