BCS and Teamviewer

After a few reports of problems when someone connected via Teamviewer to a workstation running BCS we investigated the problem and came to the following result:

Apparently Teamviewer is using a .dll that hooks itself to all running processes, including BCS. Part of the method does not seem to be considered “rock solid” by the internal Google Malloc library that BCS uses for its memory management. Therefore the library will request to immediately exit BCS whenever it detects that Teamviewer hooks itself to BCS. The exit occurs instantly, therefore without paying attention to a proper shutdown mechanism.

This has a serious side-effect:

A running BCS will freeze and hang and will need to be shut down via ending its process, leading to potential data loss.
In case BCS is not running all attempts to start BCS will fail.

After careful investigation we can state that this behavior is not fixable in BCS and is NOT a BCS bug but a side effect caused by Teamviewer's implementation.

Therefore extreme caution has to be used when connecting to workstations via Teamviewer:

- Before connecting to a remote site always check what Digas applications are running on the target machine
- If BCS is running on the machine you need to connect to, request to connect to another client, then use Microsofts remote-desktop application to connect to the target PC running BCS.
- Older BCS versions that are not using the Google Malloc library (pre build 233) are not affected by this.

We are discussing a potential fix in Teamviewer and will report back if it is available.