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Windows: Set permissions on a service

Hi,

when it is necessary that normal user needs the ability to do some operations on a service, such as starting or stopping, multiple ways exists to grant these permissions. Windows has no GUI or (easy to use) command line tool on board to set these access rights. I will show you 3 ways to set them.

  • Sysinternals Process Explorer
  • sc.exe (Service controller)
  • subinacl.exe (The security swiss knife)

For the following examples I will use the OpenVPN Service with its Service Name openvpnservice and assign the start and stop permissions to a user or group. But its the same procedure for all other services.

The easiest way is to use the sysinternals Process Explorer. It provides a graphical user interface but  has the dependency that the service must be in the running state before process explorer is started. If you already have a valid openvpn configuration start the service:

sc start openvpnservice

Then start the process explorer as administrator and locate the openvpn service process openvpnserv.exe.

Openvpn Process
Openvpn Process

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