Setting recovery options on windows services

Question

I've recently written a small class to help me change recovery options on a windows service (most of code I found online somewhere). The code creates a FailureAction for the first, second, and subsequent failures. Each Failure object contains a type (None, Restart, Reboot, RunCommand), and a Delay (int) in milliseconds. These objects are packaged inside a struct and passed into ChangeServiceConfig2 (WinAPI P/Invoke). However, when I actually right-click on a service on the console and go to the Recovery tab, you can only set the delay ("Restart server after" field) once for all failures (first, second and subsequent). When I set this programmatically, it takes the delay from the first FailureAction and ignores all others. Does anyone know why this is the case? Why do we have to pass in a delay value for all FailureAction objects when only the first one gets used? Am I misunderstanding something?

Also, setting dwResetPeriod/"Reset fail count after" doesn't seem to have any effect.

Code:

public class ServiceConfigurator
{
    private const int SERVICE_ALL_ACCESS = 0xF01FF;
    private const int SC_MANAGER_ALL_ACCESS = 0xF003F;
    private const int SERVICE_CONFIG_DESCRIPTION = 0x1;
    private const int SERVICE_CONFIG_FAILURE_ACTIONS = 0x2;
    private const int SERVICE_NO_CHANGE = -1;
    private const int ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED = 5;

    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
    private struct SERVICE_FAILURE_ACTIONS
    {
        public int dwResetPeriod;
        [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)]
        public string lpRebootMsg;
        [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)]
        public string lpCommand;
        public int cActions;
        public IntPtr lpsaActions;
    }

    [DllImport("advapi32.dll", EntryPoint = "ChangeServiceConfig2")]
    private static extern bool ChangeServiceFailureActions(IntPtr hService, int dwInfoLevel, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Struct)] ref SERVICE_FAILURE_ACTIONS lpInfo);
    [DllImport("advapi32.dll", EntryPoint = "ChangeServiceConfig2")]
    private static extern bool ChangeServiceDescription(IntPtr hService, int dwInfoLevel, [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Struct)] ref SERVICE_DESCRIPTION lpInfo);

    [DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
    private static extern int GetLastError();

    private IntPtr _ServiceHandle;
    public IntPtr ServiceHandle { get { return _ServiceHandle; } }

    public ServiceConfigurator(ServiceController svcController)
    {
        this._ServiceHandle = svcController.ServiceHandle.DangerousGetHandle();
    }

    public void SetRecoveryOptions(FailureAction pFirstFailure, FailureAction pSecondFailure, FailureAction pSubsequentFailures, int pDaysToResetFailureCount = 0)
    {
        int NUM_ACTIONS = 3;
        int[] arrActions = new int[NUM_ACTIONS * 2];
        int index = 0;
        arrActions[index++] = (int)pFirstFailure.Type;
        arrActions[index++] = pFirstFailure.Delay;
        arrActions[index++] = (int)pSecondFailure.Type;
        arrActions[index++] = pSecondFailure.Delay;
        arrActions[index++] = (int)pSubsequentFailures.Type;
        arrActions[index++] = pSubsequentFailures.Delay;

        IntPtr tmpBuff = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(NUM_ACTIONS * 8);

        try
        {
            Marshal.Copy(arrActions, 0, tmpBuff, NUM_ACTIONS * 2);
            SERVICE_FAILURE_ACTIONS sfa = new SERVICE_FAILURE_ACTIONS();
            sfa.cActions = 3;
            sfa.dwResetPeriod = pDaysToResetFailureCount;
            sfa.lpCommand = null;
            sfa.lpRebootMsg = null;
            sfa.lpsaActions = new IntPtr(tmpBuff.ToInt32());

            bool success = ChangeServiceFailureActions(_ServiceHandle, SERVICE_CONFIG_FAILURE_ACTIONS, ref sfa);
            if(!success)
            {
                if(GetLastError() == ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED)
                    throw new Exception("Access denied while setting failure actions.");
                else
                    throw new Exception("Unknown error while setting failure actions.");
            }
        }
        finally
        {
            Marshal.FreeHGlobal(tmpBuff);
            tmpBuff = IntPtr.Zero;
        }
    }
}

Trevor

Answer 1

The sc command provides a great way for automating service management. To call from code just do a Process.Start("sc", "args") and redirect the output if you want to get the result.

This one line tells the service to restart twice after waiting 1 min. on failure. After one day goes by it resets the failure count. You can also set it up to run programs, etc. on subsequent failures.

sc failure myservice reset= 86400 actions= restart/60000/restart/60000//

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc742019(v=ws.10).aspx