Controlling start up sequence of a windows service

Question

I have a windows service installed using installutil and set to "Autostart". My problem is that when some servers are rebooted it attempts to start before "Microsoft SQL service" has started- I can see this by looking at the event log during a system restart. What is the best way of making my service "auto start" AFTER Sql server service has started?

I am toying with the idea of creating a SQL job set to start when "SQL server agent" starts that in turn starts the windows service. But hopefully, there is an easy, effective way of controlling the order in which automatic services start up.

Answer 1

You can set dependencies between the services.

See here:

Answer 2

Each Windows Service has a list of other services it depends on. That means it'll wait until its dependencies have started before it will attempt to start, and it'll start them for you if they weren't started automatically when yours is started.

If you're creating your Windows Service in .NET, there's a blog post here that might be helpful:

How to: Code Service Dependencies

Otherwise there's a Microsoft kb entry here that details a way to add service dependencies via the registry:

How to delay loading of specific services

Answer 3

If you want to do this with a batch script then the following will help

REG ADD "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\%ServiceKey%" /v "DependOnService" /t REG_MULTI_SZ /d "Service Number 01\0Service Number 02"

This uses reg.exe see here

Answer 4

Dependencies are tempting but in the case of SQL Server can be harmful to the longer term design of your system. Consider if your app gets to be successful and your clients want to move to a separate SQL server on another box, or to a failover cluster.

A better design might be to put some retry/timeout logic in the startup of your service, so that it'll try to contact the SQL Server (maybe even on another machine), wait, try, then fail gracefully.