10.0.25.2 client starting to fail for some users

mmmancact · August 16, 2019, 3:27pm

We recently upgraded our farm, clients and all, to 10.0.25.2 (didn’t go to 10.0.26 due to a known issue we didn’t want to hit). Since then, we’ve started to have users get this error when running the deadlinecommand.exe:
Error: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information. (System.Reflection.ReflectionTypeLoadException)

Our only solution at this time as been to downgrade the client to 10.0.6.3 (which is what we were on before). Tried a couple intermediate versions with no luck.
At first we thought it was just a couple users with exotic things installed, but it just cropped up on a couple more, despite running fine yesterday. We also determined that it appears to be a combo of the machine and the user account, as someone logging in to the same machine for the first time is okay, and if the user logs into a different unaffected machine, it works. So while it seems like Deadline isn’t directly at fault, some thing in the newer clients is more prone to hitting a conflict that we can’t adequately diagnose.

Any suggestions are welcome.

mmmancact · August 23, 2019, 10:54pm

Just to follow up, support helped us determine this is the result of an install of another party’s software adding a DLL to .Net

mois.moshev · February 13, 2020, 9:26am

So what was the DLL? Seems like we might be bitten by the same issue.

kavi · February 13, 2020, 9:37pm

Hey @mois.moshev

This is likely because another software has installed their version of dll files into the Windows Global Assembly Cache (GAC), and overrides the file for all other software that depends on it as well including Deadline. We have seen this on some systems that has BlueBeam Revu installed.

You can fix it by:

Search for a file called “AWSSDK.Core.dll” in “C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\assembly”. If you find a matching file, either delete it or move/rename it.
Restart any Deadline Client applications that you are running after removing the file.

If you dont have any other softwares installed that could possibly cause this issue, then reinstalling the .NET Framework may be worth a try.

-Kavi

mois.moshev · February 14, 2020, 10:49am

Thank you for the reply - it really seems to be the case that some library somewhere was overridden, or something missing in the environment.

There wasn’t an AWSSDK.Core.dll in that directory. Any other ideas? I have dependency walker, so I could try to track down a missing assembly, but starting where?

mois.moshev · March 11, 2020, 12:13pm

Upgrading both Client and Repo seems to have fixed this. I bet it has to do with the upgrade reinstalling .net or vc++.