LCDSmartie as a Service Instructions

[mbrinkho]

Are there any instructions out there that detail how to run LCDSmartie as a service? I'd like to run it on my Windows Server box but I don't want to have to be logged in to see it. Thanks!

[mattcro]

LCD Smartie was never designed to run as a service, but you may be able to get it working using one of the manual workarounds for running applications as services. I've never done this so don't know if it'll work or not...

See http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/83272-h ... a-service/ for some info on creating a service from an app. Also search for "run as service" or similar. I've seen some posts such as http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w ... ff2e5060cf related to Smartie specifically. It sounds like they had trouble running Smartie plugins but that was from 2007...

Let us know if you get something working, as this topic comes up occasionally.

[mbrinkho]

** This is for Windows Server 2003, I do not know how well it would work on Server 2008. **

I ended up using SRVSTART from Nick Rozanski. Download it and unzip into c:\srvstart. Per the instructions copy srvstart.exe, srvstart.dll and logger.dll to c:\windows\system32 (or another directory in your path.) Then create the file srvstart.ini in the c:\srvstart directory with the following contents:

Code: Select all

startup_delay=2

[LCDSmartie]
startup=c:\progra~1\lcdsmartie\lcdsmartie.exe -totalhide
startup_dir=c:\progra~1\lcdsmartie\
shutdown_method=winmessage

This assumes you have your LCD Smartie installed into c:\Program Files\LCDSmartie. Change the startup and startup_dir lines if yours is somewhere else. Now open a command prompt and cd into your c:\srvstart folder. Execute this command:

Code: Select all

srvstart.exe install LCDSmartie -c C:\SRVSTART\SRVSTART.INI

This will create a windows service with the name "LCDSmartie". You can now start the service from the Service manager or set it to autostart so it will automatically run when you restart.

There is a quick start guide for SRVSTART here and more documentation here if you want to do some reading.

[Tarbender]

Awesome, the SRVSTART procedure still works to get LCDSmartie to Run As A Service on Windows 8 64bit.

Thanks Guys!

[lcdguy]

are you sure this work on windows 8?