Re: How to make sure a Service starts BEFORE a user logs on? by Ray
Ray
Fri May 27 15:47:00 CDT 2005
Yes, there are tons of better ways to determine that the machine has
just booted. Probably the easiest really reliable way is to write a
non-unloadable kernel driver that starts during boot. Its DriverEntry
routine will be called exactly.
If you need a service, another poster suggested just using the start of
the service as a flag for this. That works too and is probably even
easier if you already have a service that does something you want it to
do. Services aren't normally restarted, and you can prevent that with
access controls if you're worried about a non-administrator restarting
it. If you're worried about an admin restarting your service, well,
there's not a lot you can do about that in the general case, so don't try.
BTW, detecting a "reboot" (as in a warm boot vs. a cold boot) is
somewhat harder (and a lot harder if not impossible if it has to
determine this with 100% reliability), but it doesn't sound like that's
what you're trying to do.
In any event, the "logged on user count" can be 1 in a large number of
circumstances, so I wouldn't use this as a key for anything.
Polaris wrote:
> Thanks for the info.
>
> Within the service program, I need to "detect" the event that the machine
> has JUST rebooted. So I look for (each second) the change of logged on user
> count: right after reboot, the logged on user count should be one (which is
> the "System" account, assuming the service starts before any user has logged
> on the machine). After the user logs on the machine, the service will notice
> that the user count increased to 2 and get a "conclution" that the machine
> must have JUST been rebooted. It works fine as long as the user did not log
> on to the machine before the service starts.
>
> May be there is other way to detect a reboot event?
>
> Polaris
>
> "Ray Trent" <ratrent@nospam.nospam> wrote in message
> news:OHb4mguYFHA.2160@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
>
>>Services can, of course, take an arbitrary and unpredictable amount of
>>time to "start up". Off the top of my head, the only way I can think of to
>>do what you want here would be to write a GINA and synchronize its passing
>>on of credentials with completion of your service startup.
>>
>>Ugly job, and nasty if there turns out to be a bug in your code :-).
>>
>>Why does your service need to run before a user logs on? This sounds
>>suspiciously like you're asking the wrong question.
>>
>>Polaris wrote:
>>
>>>Hi:
>>>
>>>I have a regular Windows Service program (not a kernel driver) which must
>>>start BEFORE a user logs into his machine (XP or W2K). It works most of
>>>the time, but sometimes, I noticed that it started AFTER I log on the
>>>machine; especially if I logged in the machine fast right after a reboot.
>>>
>>>Is there a way in the service program, I can do something to make sure
>>>that, after reboot, the service starts before a user logs in the machine
>>>(no matter how fast the user is trying to complete his logon process)?
>>>
>>>Thanks In Advance !
>>>Polaris
>>
>>--
>>../ray\..
>
>
>
--
../ray\..