[wpkg-users] Running WPKG as a service

[Urs Rau]

Hi Tomasz,

Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
> Urs Rau wrote:
>> Hi Mark,
>>
>> Mark Cairney wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Just to share the fix I had for this particular problem- I created a
>>> scheduled task at logon to restart the wpkg service. This appears to
>>> give me the best of both worlds in that it checks it's state when a user
>>> logs on but also has a service on the machine that can be started so
>>> that updates can (if necessary) be pushed out to clients. Thanks for the
>>> pointer.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Mark
>>
>> Could you spell out the steps you took, please? Would this work for the
>> scenario when users are not admins but restricted users, and therefore
>> would work and update wpkg xml files and install remove software 'even -
>> if' a user with admin rights never logged in to this workstation?
>> I guess I am showing that I haven't tried scheduled tasks and therefore
>> don't know what rights are effective for those things.
> 
> Well, that's the whole purpose of using WPKG - install software, even if
> no user logged in - and even if he/she logged in, it doesn't matter if
> that user is an admin or not, as the logon process is completely
> unrelated to software deployment / WPKG process.
> 

Yes, I know that part, that is also why I am using wpkg in the first place.

> schtasks (or WPKG Installer, or any other *proper* way of starting WPKG)
> start our tiny deployment tool as Administrator, SYSTEM user, or any
> other user with sufficient rights.
> 

On re-reading my post I can see that I have not done a very good job at
explaining what my real question is. Sorry about that.

Some background to my question. My problem with regards to different
ways of running and stopping and restarting wpkg service seems to be
mostly centred around the fact that in my environment, (xp pro
workstations connected to linux samba PDC with active network mappings)
I cannot have more than one user credential active with mappings against
the server. So it's a case of one or the other. So if the user has
logged in to the server and has his or her network drives mapped against
the PDC, as automatically done by the network logon script, then I can't
run a scheduled run of 'wpkg.js /synchronize' using different, 'network
- admin - access - privileged', user credentials against the same samba
pdc server.

So the 'only' way I have found wpkg service working for me is when set
to startup as a service that has specific privileged
network username and password set for the service. But this means
the wpkg.js is not run often enough to pickup changes, unless I also
start interfering more with how often people restart their workstations.
So Marc Cairney's message made me wonder if there was any way to use the
scheduled tasks event 'onlogon' to try to run the 'wpkg.js /synchronize'
task
every time a user logged on. And what I meant to ask was, what the exact
sequence is when the 'onlogon' scheduled task is run? The main question
here
being if there is any guarantee that the logon procedure and the
attempts at user privilege level drive mappings would not be
fouled up by the scheduled task still using the wpkg service's
privileged network mapping? I suspect there is going to be trouble one
way or another either during login or because of profiles not being
fully 'released' by windows after a user logout, and therefore the
scheduled 'onlogon' task not being able to map drives with it's privileges.

I guess the only way around all this, will be to have the wpkg files
served by another instance of the samba server and hence being able to
have the freedom to use two differently privileged
 user credentials across the network.

> 
> 
> If you're using a Linux server, you can add a task remotely with winexe:
> 
> http://eol.ovh.org/winexe/
> 

Thanks, this is great. Works really well for me.

Regards,

-- 
Urs Rau