Writing a windows service - where to start?!?! Should I start??

[stephenmbell]

I am faced with an issue here and I am thinking that a writing a windows service would solve my problem. Here is the problem:

I have 700 windows xp machines - set up as POS systems, in 350 distinct locations on my network. Currently, these machines are not part of a domain and auto-logon as local administrator. In addition, every one of these machines has their entire C drive shared out to "everyone" - with only 2 PC's per location - this gives the ability to access anything on POS1 from POS2 and vice versa.

POS1 is the "manager" system at each location. I have the ability to send down new configuration (price changes, settings changes, deliver software updates) to the manager POS and because of this shared environment - I can propitiate these changes to both POS machines at this remote location. We send these files to a directory and we have a scheduled task that runs a vbs every 15 minutes to look for new files in this location. If they are found, the vbs applies the changes.

Because of industry regulations and security concerns we have to change the way we have our systems set up. We cannot have the entire C drive shared, we cannot have the user logged in as a local admin, etc.

As a result we are implementing an Active Directory to allow us to manage all 700 machines more centrally. In addition, we are removing the entire c drive share. However, we will have access to the C$ share.

This is where the service comes in. I have read some posts about not writing a service when a scheduled task is needed (//TODONT: Use a Windows Service just to run a scheduled process - Jon Galloway

However, with security being a concern, and elevated privileges being required to access the C$ share - I think a service makes sense because it can run in the context of an admin user.

This being said - first:

Does this make sense? Am I thinking clearly??

and second:

Where do I start. Where can I get good information about writing services. I have done some google searches and read some articles but they don't seem to have much information other than.. write this code... etc etc..

Thanks in advance for any replies

sb

 

[LeonR]

Why don't you concentrate on getting the PC's added to the domain, and then use group policies (if the right ones exist) to maybe reconfigure the PC's? What I mean is, do you need to even use a service?

Your missions is to 1.) add the pc's to the domain and 2.) reconfigure the C: NTFS/sharing? (turn off sharing basically as then only c$ should be accessible by other admins?)