Getting services to see 'subst' drives

[Andrew McDonald]

I need a service running on an XP Pro SP3 box to access a drive letter which
is created using subst. However I can't find any way to set this up; I think
subst setups are limited to the session they're created in, is that right?
I've tried putting the command in HKLM Run, boot time scheduled task, logon
time scheduled task, and setting the service to run as my user account &
trying an HKCU Run task, but none of that seems to get executed/affect the
session created for the service.

I've also tried sharing the folder on the network and setting a persistant
connection to it instead of using subst, but that didn't work either.

Any advice? If it's not possible, i.e. there's no way to set up the
environment in which a service runs, I guess I'll just create an extra
partition and name it properly instead of using subst...

Thanks in advance,
Andy

 

[Anteaus]

http://www.howtofixcomputers.com/forums/xp-networking/subst-no-longer-works-did-85099.html

I like they way they say "was done for security reasons" :-/

Um, yes, so it's the reason we now have to use automatic logon on 2003
servers, so that processes which need LAN access can run under a single
common useraccount instead of as services? Improved security?

Not.

 

[Andrew McDonald]

Thanks for the link. The annoying thing isn't that it's per-user (since I
could set the service to run as my account instead of the system), but that
it doesn't persist between sessions for that user and there's no way to set
it up for the service's session.

We'll probably just go for the repartitioning...

 

[Anteaus]

Yep, partitioning is likely your best option.

The alternative is as we do, to run the processes under an auto-logon
useraccount. Disadvantage is that it dictates which account must be running,
and it must not be changed of logged-off. Though, you can lock the account's
desktop once it's running.

Might be worth adding that although it is possible to change the credentials
that a service runs under to those of a logged-on user, doing so creates a
separate instance of that account from the one on the desktop, so in most
cases doesn't solve the problem.