Minim as a service on Windows

[skeptic Mike]

(30-05-2016 21:09)simoncn Wrote:  For a description of what another user has done, see this post.

Looking at that thread (which I should have found) that user decided instead to automate running minimserver as the currently logged on user. That's what I want to avoid.

In that thread:

Quote:simoncn Wrote:
MinimServer uses the startup directory location to compute the location of its configuration files. If you use a different directory for startup, MinimServer will go into test mode, which isn't supported or recommended.

Is there some reason why you can't configure the Windows service to change directory to the "lib" directory before starting MinimServer? For example, you could do this by running a cmd.exe /c script that sets the directory and then starts MinimServer.

That does raise some questions. I had already noticed that if you changed the startup directory, MinimServer couldn't find its configuration and prompted for a new one. I was puzzled by this, as I couldn't figure out why MinimServer would find the users %appdata% path if started from the lib folder, but not do so if started from elsewhere. However, once I'd configured MinimServer again, it seemed to work fine, so I ignored it.

I would expect that if run as a service using srvany.exe, that MinimServer wouldn't be able to find a user's configuration, because it's in the users profile. Local System (the identity with which it would be running) doesn't have a normal profile, and programs run as system that expect this tend to break.

Depending on the method MinimServer uses to find the configuration folder, and how that behaves when run by "local system" or "local Service" would affect whether MinimServer could come up with a sensible configuration location. I'd be happier to define a different startup folder and set the Java class path on the command line (if required). But, if this isn't a recommended or supported configuration, then this is trickier. I have one broken UPnP renderer which doesn't correctly support mpeg 1 audio (only supports layer 3), but servers and control points will only work with mpeg 1 layer 2 audio if it's marked as layer 3 (mp3). This also suggests that running two instances of MinimServer (which I would want to do to be able to offer transcoded audio only to my broken renderer) under windows isn't supported either. Using different startup folders and changing the ports I had this working.

My guess would be that MinimServer uses environment variables to find the user profile. Finding standard user locations in Windows Java is tricky because the java view of homepath was defined by Sun as the parent of the desktop folder up to version 7, and the user profile path in version 8. (On standalone desktop machines this is usually the same path, but the user is free to change the location of their desktop folder, on managed machines with redirected desktop folders it's usually different)

All of which suggests that I may be looking at an "interesting" problem - and probably explains why noone has tried this before and reported success.