In Windows Server 2008R2 Microsoft introduced Session-0 security – easy explanation: so it becomes much harder for interactive service to run as Local System and interacts with users.
If you want to run EA (an interactive app) as an unattended Windows Service (as an interactive service) you have to do some strange steps to achieve. Follow the Version 1.0 of the attached whitepaper to get it run.
Oh yeah, that is fun
Whitepaper: EA as unattended Windows Service
Hi there, and thank you for your whitepaper about running EA as a Windows Service on Windows Server 2008R2 and higher… it gave us lights about how to make it (we definitely need EA running as a service), but unfortunately we have been unable to make the service to run without a session running on Windows. Is there a way you can hep us with your knowledge and experience on the subject for us to achieve the goal to make EA run as an unattended service on Win 2008 R2? Thank you very much!
Hi, same question as above. The solution in the whitepaper doesn’t seem to work for us, but we still very much need to run EA from within a ASP.NET 4+ web app deployed to IIS7 on Win2008R2. Please drop me a line if you can offer/provide any further hints/tips/insights.
Yes we are able to support you – the hint is: DCOMCnfg to configure security to access EA.tlb. I’ll send you an email – whom you may contact.
Hey, I have also implemented the solution described in your whitepaper, but the solution does not seem to work. We have a web service that writes to Sparx EA using dll provided by Sparx. Even after implementing the whitepaper, i can successfully write to Sparx EA only when the EA.app component is running as “interactive user.” As soon as I change the component to run as “launching user”, it no longer works. My web service is running in ISS under local system account, and i can see that when i call the web service another instance of EA.exe shows up in task manager running under local system account. But it does not write to Sparx successfully. If you would be willing to provide a contact, any further hints would would be most appreciated. thanks.
please note, there exists an update on this article:
http://blog.lieberlieber.com/2016/06/15/update-ea-as-an-unattended-windows-service-on-windows-server-2008r2-and-higher/