Thursday, January 27, 2005

Windows services -- looking for some advice

Ok, here's a little bit of background:

Checkpoint SecureClient is VPN software.  When you have the SecureClient software installed on a machine, you sometimes run into trouble with the SecureClient software running behind a VPN appliance.  SecureClient runs as 2 services -- Checkpoint SecureClient Service and Checkpoint SecureClient Watchdog.  The SecureClient Service is stopped when you exit the SecureClient application in the system tray, but Watchdog continues to run and that is what causes the problem with the VPN appliances.

To work around this problem, I have designated in services.msc that both services run manually and when I want to use the services, I have to start them through services.msc.  If I start the Watchdog Service, it automatically starts the associated SecureClient Service.

Got all that?  So here's what I'm looking for:

On a Mac I would program an AppleScript to turn the services on for me when I need them; Windows does not seem to have an analog to AppleScript that would allow me to do this; does it?

What I am looking for is an icon on my desktop that, when I double-click it, turns on and off the Watchdog and SecureClient Services so that I do not have to go into services.msc.  I would imagine that the application would use a simple "If, then" test to check if the service was either started or stopped and simply turn the start or stop the service based on the result of the test; if it had to be 2 icons on my desktop: 1 for start, 1 for stop, that would be ok too.

Anybody have any ideas or advice?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

NET START 'SERVICENAME'

will start a service and can be put in a batch file.
i.e. STARTEVERYTHINGINEED.BAT

hope this helps

Ross said...

Yup, that worked pretty well. I just created a very simple .bat file in Notepad. It's weird that sometimes when Watchdog starts, the little key icon doesn't show up in the tray and sometimes it does. I'm going to do a little more research and may input some amount of pause into the .bat file and have the .bat launch the SecureClient app just in case.

Thanks very much for the help.