NI Error Reporting Service

[mje]

So I was "playing" by installing our latest release candidate on Windows 8 even though we don't officially support it. This is a fresh OS I just installed with the following extras installed:

• Our application
  
• LabVIEW 2011 SP1f2 RTE*
  
• Microsoft .NET 3.5.1
  
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Redistributable
  

We have 32-bit and 64-bit installers, each with the appropriate applications/run-times. Anyways, the first thing I notice in the task manager is this on our fresh Win8 64 OS after getting things up and running:

Does this imply that the default RTE install activates the NI error reporting service which has the potential to send back data to NI? Under which conditions would the error reporting be triggered for a LabVIEW-built executable?

-m

*I'll note that due to a defect in the 64-bit LabVIEW application builder, we are forced to go third-party for the installer. Thus the RTE is installed via a silent install of the extracted downloadable RTE installer (that is we don't have an NI built installer). The installer is executed via:

setup.exe /q /AcceptLicenses yes /r /disableNotificationCheck

[JamesMc86]

I have been having a look at this but find no specifics on what it reports but I suspect it is the same as the IDE, internal errors to the RTE.

When you build the installer in LabVIEW you should have the option to include it or not but obviously you cannot in this case. If it is a concern though it is easy to disable with an ini token or just disabling the service as described in http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/368F508D3FAE0242862578D400770616?OpenDocument

[mje]

Thanks for looking into this James.

I definitely haven't ever noticed the service doing anything from our applications, which is part of the reason I never even knew the RTE installed it until Windows 8 made it plain as day (at least for those of us who use task manager regularly). This however will be the first time we haven't used an NI-built installer so my experience with using a full RTE install is limited-- previous versions of our application used an NI-installer and excluded the NIER option.

It was indeed a concern as one of our design requirements is the application have no footprint on the network as it can be called upon to handle some pretty sensitive intellectual property for customers who worry about such things.

That document you linked though is very useful. Especially this quote:

How does NIER work with the LV RTE (LabVIEW built apps, dlls, interop assembly etc.)?

You will get a crash dialog when an internal error (DAbort) or exception is detected. However, the crash dialog does not have the option to send the report to National Instruments. The product name shown will be the name of the process that's crashing and not LabVIEW. Internal Warnings will cause mini-dumps to be created, but the Internal Warning Reporter dialog box will not appear when you close the application. These characteristics apply to LabVIEW built applications, dlls and interop assemblies

So it seems we're in the clear: data will not be sent over the network to NI.

[JamesMc86]

Ah probably should have clicked through another myself! Pleasd it has the info though