net.exe purpose?

[shinymcshires]

Out of curiosity, what is the purpose of net.exe and net1.exe? They don't chew up a whole lot of RAM, but there are roughly 75 of each processes running on the TM1 server:

net-exe.JPG (115.42 KiB) Viewed 2529 times

Thank you for your input!

[Alan Kirk]

Out of curiosity, what is the purpose of net.exe and net1.exe? They don't chew up a whole lot of RAM, but there are roughly 75 of each processes running on the TM1 server

It's a command line network tool. However it shouldn't be generating that number of processes.

For the application itself, see:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa939914.aspx

The usual reasons for such a ridiculous number of processes are either:
- A virus (do a scan to be sure); or
- You have some piece of junk application or script in your server's startup routine which is triggering them.

[shinymcshires]

Alan-

Thanks for your reply. I discussed the issue with our IT manager, and have narrowed the culprit down to two processes:

1. Due to limitations with our financial database, we have scheduled batch files that stop and start the tm1sd and tm1admin services. (This "refreshes" our ODBC connection). Unfortunately, sometimes the net start command doesn't happen, so there is a redundant net start command in the event that the tm1sd service doesn't start. Perhaps that redundant net start command is the culprit, leaving a hanging process, until the server is restarted (which we did, and all of the net.exe and net1.exe processes were gone. We determined that the server had been up for 36 days, and I'm sure it was no coincidence that there were 72 instances of each net.exe and net1.exe processes.

2. There is a vb script that runs nightly to copy the data directory.

I'm going to keep an eye on it, and we'll run Process Explorer in a few days to get down to the culprit.