Monday, February 15, 2016

torrent as a service in Windows--thwarted by updates

So, I was ran a torrent server in Linux for many years, but last year I decided to take the plunge back into Windows.  I am running Windows Server 2012 R2.  Running a torrent as a service isn't as straightforward as in Linux, but I'd been through a similar process with Windows Server 2008 using srvany.exe.  That part hasn't changed, so I was able to get it going without much difficulty.

But then at the beginning of the year it stopped working.  I didn't have time to investigate for awhile, but when I did I learned that there was a torrent process running, but the process wasn't the same.  After awhile I realized that the torrent program was trying to update itself and instead of running the application, it was running the new installer, and was waiting for a user to walk through the install steps.  So I knew the problem, but wasn't sure of the fix.  I was pretty sure that the service was running as some privileged user and I didn't know how to run as that user.  The privileged user account is the SYSTEM account, and the solution was to download pstools and run psexec.exe.  I was able to use that program to start a command prompt as SYSTEM and then run the torrent program from there.  Problem solved.

Now I need to go back and figure out how to stop the torrent program from doing automatic updates...

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