Running DC projects as services

[RussianSoldier]

Follow these directions to create a user defined service in Windows 2000. Additionally, it may work in XP. I'd imagine it would work with any distributed computing program, so long as it does not require user intervention.

For large setups, I simply made a .reg file of the changes.

 

[Polo]

Thanks for the detailed info page.

 

[amdxborg]

Cool Thanx!

 

[ProviaFan]

Just a note for the F@H people... the soon forthcoming v5 client has built in run-as-a-service support, without needing any external helper programs. Thanks to Gleem for the info.

 

[RussianSoldier]

another note... you can run pretty much any program as a service, not just DC...

 

[mondobyte]

I've experimented with this approach.

If the program that is to be run as a service is not designed to be run as a service, then it will respond to the logoff and shut down. So it works fine on startup and through the first user to logon but will exit when the user logs off.

That is the reason for products like Firedaemon that continually monitor the program to be run as a service and restart it whenever it exits.

A much better answer is to run it as a scheduled task under Windows 2000 and later. Because it runs in it's own logon it will not exit until you shutdown or restart.

Running FaD as a scheduled task also has a couple of other differences.

For FaD, the normal interfaces (tasktray icon) will not appear. Even if you select windowed for THINK and Server, they don't show up when running FaD as a scheduled task.

Running FaD as a service with srvany may leave the interfaces available to the user depending on how the service is configured.

Personally, I run a large number of clients as scheduled tasks.

 

[RussianSoldier]

I think using Srvany.exe fixes that issue; I've had no problems on a number of programs...

 

[Coolkid]

Been using this method for a while myself, works well