High Performance NT4 Optimization and Tuning:Maintaining Services And Device Drivers

Managing Services Using The Control Panel Services Applet

The Control Panel Services applet is used to control the operating state of any installed Windows NT service. The Services applet can be used to specify a command-line argument to be passed to a service when the service is started. It can also be used to specify when to start a service and a user account that provides the base privileges for the service. This last option is quite important as the user account determines the privileges the service has when operating on your network. You might, for example, want to schedule regular backups of your client computers using the Scheduler service. By default, this service uses the local system account. The local system account has privileges slightly higher than the local Administrator user account, but these privileges are specific to the computer on which the service runs. What this means to you is that the Scheduler service does not have sufficient privileges to connect to your client’s disk drive so you can back it up using your tape drive.

So, what can you do about the situation? Well, you have two choices. First, you could create batch files to submit to the Schedule service. The batch files would contain a series of commands (a script, if you will) that will use the NET command to connect to the client’s disk drive and then use NTBACKUP to back up the disk drives content to tape. But in order to do this, the NET command must include a user account and password with sufficient privileges to connect to the client’s disk drive. Most times, this user account would be an administrative user account—one with permission to access any computer’s shared drives. Because this would allow anyone who read the batch file to obtain an administrative user account and password, you would have to place the batch file on an NTFS partition and use NTFS permissions to lock the batch file away from prying eyes. Generally speaking, these permissions would include the System local group or any one of the Administrators local group or Domain Admins global group to access the files. Some administrator’s consider this process to be too much of a chore. Or, they need to allow members of the Backup Operators or Server Operators groups to initiate the backup. Neither one of these groups should have administrative privileges, so they would not have access to the protected batch file either.

This is where your second choice comes into play. Some administrators would rather specify an administrative user account for the scheduler server to run under. Then, when the batch file executes, the administrator would not need to specify a user account and password in the script because the batch file would run using the security context of the Scheduler service that already has administrative privileges.

Note: You could also create a non-administrative user account for the Scheduler service to use. But in that situation, you would have to make sure that every client computer allowed the user account to have read and write privileges to the shared disk drives. This is a more difficult process than it seems, simply because most networks have new computers being placed online quite often.

So, now that we know what the Services applet does, let’s step through the various methods, one at a time. We’ll start with the method to control a service’s operating state and specify its command-line arguments. Then, we’ll move on and discuss how to configure a service’s startup options.

Controlling A Service’s Operating State

The easiest way to control the operating state of a Windows NT service is to use the Control Panel Services applet. This is, however, not the only way, as you will see a little further on in this chapter, in the section titled “Managing Services From The Command Line.” In the meantime, the Services applet, shown in Figure 12.1, has a very intuitive interface. It can be launched in different ways. First, you can choose Settings from the Start menu on the taskbar and then select Control Panel to display all of the Control Panel applets. Or, you can open the Control Panel from My Computer on the desktop. You can even do what I did to make accessing these applets even easier—add the Control Panel applets directly to the taskbar.

Figure 12.1 Using the Services Control Panel applet.

Adding The Control Panel Applets To The Taskbar
Adding applets to your taskbar is easier than you might think. There are actually many different methods to do this, but I think the two most useful methods will make things easier to follow. The first method is to open the Control Panel, choose Select All from the Edit menu, then drag the highlighted icons over the Start menu and drop them on it. This will place shortcuts to all the Control Panel applets at the top of the Programs menu making them just two clicks away. But I prefer to place these shortcuts in another folder for better use of my Start menu real estate. To accomplish this task, just follow these basic steps:

1.  Open the Control Panel.
2.  Select Taskbar on the Settings option on the Start menu.
The Taskbar Properties dialog box should appear.
3.  Click the Start Menu Program tab to display the Start Menu property sheet.
4.  Click the Advanced button.
The Windows NT Explorer should appear with the Start Menu folder already expanded.
5.  In the right window pane, right-click, and choose Folder from the New pop-up menu.
6.  Rename the folder to Control Panel, and press the Enter key.
7.  Double-click the Control Panel folder you just created in Steps 5 and 6. This will make the folder the default folder.
8.  Change to the Control Panel (not the folder you just created), and choose Select All from Edit menu.
9.  Now, drag the highlighted icons in the Control Panel to the right window pane in the Windows NT Explorer and drop the icons into the Control Panel folder you just created in Steps 5 and 6.
10.  Close the Windows NT Explorer, the Control Panel, and then click the OK button on the Taskbar Properties dialog box.

That’s all there is to it. If your shortcuts have the Shortcut To text prefaced on them, you might want to rename them after Step 9. As for myself, I use the Microsoft Powertoys to configure the Windows NT Explorer to not include the Shortcut To text. You can find this tool on the Microsoft Web site at www.microsoft.com/msdownload. It works under Windows 95 as well as Windows NT 4. Keep in mind that any new Control Panel applets that are installed by third-party software will need to be added to your Control Panel folder manually to keep both your folder and the Control Panel in sync.

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