Subject: From: Date:

RE: [ECS] NT system Ingo Pakleppa Fri, 03 Dec 1999 13:04:46 -0800

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At 10:04 AM 12/3/99 -0600, Lanter, Steven SB SNORC wrote:
>Questions posed to those using NT and ECS
>
>1.  Do you run ECS on a PC running server or a workstation?  Does it matter?

NT Server and NT Workstation are identical binaries. The only difference is
that some registry entries are different, and NTS comes with additional
software (DHCP server, WINS server, DNS server, domain server support,
...). The different registry entries cause for different optimizations, but
over time, MS actually allowed to to tweak the same options manually.

Bottom line: it would be an extremely rare case that any program depends on
NTS or NTW, except for those that explicitly check (mostly Microsoft
products who refuse to run on NTW, such as SQL server, Exchange server,
...). The different optimizations may cause software to perform better or
worse on one or the other though. My guess is that ECS would perform
marginally better on NTS because that is more optimized towards running
background tasks permanently. As long as ECS is the only program ever
running, you should not notice a difference.

>2.  Can you load ECS automatically during or just after boot -- in other
>words, before anyone actually logs on.

There are two ways to achieve that.

1) Enable Autologon. Either search for "autologon" in the MS Knowledge base
(http://support.microsoft.com) and tweak the registry, or download TweakUI
from their Web site. If you do that, the user name and password will be
stored in the registry, and NT will automatically log you on right after
reboot. Put ECS into the startup group, and it will come up fully
automatically.

2) configure NT to run ECS as a service. Since ECS is not designed for that
purpose, this does not work well. The problem is that services don't have a
user interface; service developers are expected to provide a separate
program that COMMUNICATES with the service and provides the actual user
interface.

For now, you can still run ECS as a service in the following way:

- get the NT Resource Kit. In it, you will find a utility that lets you run
any executable as a service. Actually, this utility is a freeware utility
that MS just packaged, so you may also be able to find the same one for
free on some shareware sites. Sorry, I can't give you a name. Search for
the keywords "NT service"

- configure this utility according to the instructions to run ECS

- go to the control panel, go to Services, select this service, change it's
properties to use the local system account. If you do that, you can also
configure the service to "show it's face" - that is, show it's user
interface. Drawback: it's quite possible that ECS may experience a lot of
problems because the local system account essentially means that ECS will
run without being logged on. So it doesn't have many permissions. For
instance, it may well be possible that NT would prevent ECS from opening a
serial port. You will have to test it to see whether ECS works in this mode.

- There may be a third way, but I don't know if it works. The NT Resource
Kit also contains another utility (also freeware that may be available for
free somewhere else) that lets NT run an Autoexec.BAT on bootup instead of
when you log on. this Autoexec may also be able to start ECS. Since it's
also a service, ECS would probably have the same problems as the previous
suggestion, though.

- There may be a fourth way. Run ECS as a service as described above, but
let it run under an administrator account with full permissions, and
without a user interface. I seem to remember that you can control ECS
remotely from a touch screen, or something like that, with the ACE program.
Since I have never used it, I don't know exactly how well it works, and
whether all ECS functions would be available that way.

Ingo

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