Windows Service

Table of Contents

• Windows Service User Accounts
• Enabling the Xentara Licence Server Service
• Viewing Service Logs
• Managing the Service Using PowerShell
  • Enabling the Service
  • Stopping and Starting the Service
  • Getting Status and Log Entries
  • Disabling the Service

Note

Windows users require special privileges to configure and start services.

Under Windows, the Xentara licence server installer installs a Windows service that can be used to start the Xentara licence server when the computer starts up.

Windows services can be managed using PowerShell, or by using the “Services” MMC snap-in. You can open the “Services” snap-in by typing “Services” in the Windows Task bar search field, or you can open the snap-in from the Computer Management console.

Windows Service User Accounts

See also

Service User Accounts in the Windows technical documentation at learn.microsoft.com

By default, the Xentara licence server service runs under the built-in Windows LocalService account. This is not a real user account, and does not have a local app data directory. This means that the config file and licence files must be placed in the program data directory, under %ProgramData%\Xentara Licence Server\Config.

Windows allows you to configure a service to run under any user, if desired. If you configure the Xentara licence server to run under a normal Windows user, you can place the configuration and licence files in the usual places. The user under which a Windows service runs can be configured using the “Services” MMC snap-in.

Enabling the Xentara Licence Server Service

The Xentara licence server Windows service is technically called “XentaraLicenceServer”. To improve readability, however, the “Services” snap-in and other UI applications show the service using its display name, “Xentara Licence Server”.

By default, the Xentara licence server service is disabled, and needs to be enabled before it can be started. You can use the “Services” MMC snap-in to enable and configure the Xentara service. Open the “Services” snap-in, and scroll down until you find the Xentara Licence Server service:

Image 4: the Xentara Licence Server service in the “Services” MMC snap-in

Double-click on Xentara Licence Server service to open the properties, and change the Startup type to “Automatic”:

Image 5: properties of the Xentara Licence Server service

You can also set the startup type to “Manual” if you want to start and stop the service manually.

Viewing Service Logs

The Xentara licence server service logs information and error events to the Windows event log. You can use the Windows event viewer to view errors and messages logged by Xentara. To open the Windows event viewer, you can type “Event Viewer” in the Windows Task bar search field.

The events logged by the Xentara licence server service can be found in the Event Viewer under Application and Service Logs→embedded ocean GmbH→Xentara→Xentara Licence Server:

Image 6: Xentara licence server events in the Windows Event Viewer

Managing the Service Using PowerShell

Note

To manage Windows services, PowerShell needs to be run as an administrator. To run PowerShell as an administrator, right-click on the PowerShell or Terminal icon in the Windows Start Menu, and select “Run as Administrator”.

PowerShell commands

Set-Service, Stop-Service, Start-Service, Restart-Service, Get-WinEvent

Enabling the Service

To enable the Xentara licence server service, use the following command:

Set-Service -Name XentaraLicenceServer -StartupType Automatic

Stopping and Starting the Service

To stop the Xentara licence server service, use the following command:

Stop-Service -Name XentaraLicenceServer

To start the Xentara licence server service, use the following command:

Start-Service -Name XentaraLicenceServer

To restart the Xentara licence server service (e.g. to reload a changed configuration file), use the following command:

Restart-Service -Name XentaraLicenceServer

Getting Status and Log Entries

To get the status of the Xentara licence server service, use the following command:

Get-Service XentaraLicenceServer

You can show and filter log entries using the Get-WinEvent command. The name of the event log for the Xentara service is embeddedOceanGmbH-Xentara-XentaraLicenceServer/Admin.

To show the last 100 log entries, you can use the following command, for example:

Get-WinEvent embeddedOceanGmbH-Xentara-XentaraLicenceServer/Admin -MaxEvents 100

Get-WinEvent has extensive filtering options described in the documentation. To show all critical error events, for example, you can use the following command:

Get-WinEvent -FilterHashTable @{ LogName="embeddedOceanGmbH-Xentara-XentaraLicenceServer/Admin"; Level=1 }

Disabling the Service

To disable the Xentara licence server service again, so that it can no longer be started, use the following command:

Set-Service -Name XentaraLicenceServer -StartupType Disabled

Note that that will not stop the service automatically. You need to stop the service explicitly after you disable it.