Igor Peshansky wrote:
On Tue, 13 Jun 2006, Rich Chase wrote:
I compiled PRNGD against cygwin and installed it as a cygrunsrv service.
When I try to start the service, I get the infamous:
"Could not start the PRNGD service on Local Computer. The service did
not return an error. This could be an internal Windows error or an
internal service error. If the problem persists, contact your system
administrator."
This message is usually an indication that you are trying to run a
daemon-type program (one that forks off the actual daemon and returns)
with cygrunsrv. The whole intent of cygrunsrv is to take a program that
needs to run continuously in the foreground, and turn it into a daemon.
However, I am running sshd as a service, and vnc as well -- both using
cygrunsrv.
Notice that you needed to give the -D option to sshd to prevent it from
going into the daemon mode.
I also am able to run prngd.exe manually without any errors or log
output. It successfully generates random numbers, as verified by the egd
testing perl script, and it does not terminate prematurely.
Ah, but does it run from the SYSTEM account?
PRNGD does start an "entropy gatherer" program, which returns and
terminates. Could this child process's termination and return value be
causing cygrunsrv to 'think' that prngd.exe runs and then terminates? If
it did, would prngd.exe still be running (it isn't)?
Not likely.
Everything seems to run fine, but doesn't start as a service.
Suggestions Please?
You have two options here: find out if there is a way to run PRNGD in
non-daemon mode (via a command-line option, for example), or read about
the --pidfile option to cygrunsrv.
Dave may also be correct that this is a permission issue -- try starting a
"SYSTEM-owned bash shell" (Google for it), and see if the program works
from there.
HTH,
Igor
Solved. Thanks to both Igor and Dave. As it turns out, I needed both
pieces of advice -- my problem
was a combination of both!
Igor, you were dead on. I needed to tell prngd to create a pid file, and
tell cygrunsrv where to put it:
#> cygrunsrv -I PRNGD -p /usr/sbin/prngd.exe -d PRNGD -f "Pseudo-random
Number Generator" \
-a "-p /var/run/prngd.pid -s /etc/prngd-seed
/var/run/egd-pool" -o -x /var/run/prngd.pid
Also, by looking at my errors in the event log, I saw: "failed:
redirect_fd: open (1, /var/log/PRNGD.log): \
13, Permission denied.
>From this I discovered that I had a left-over PRNGD.log file (windows
doesn't recognize the case difference)
that did not have SYSTEM write permissions.
After fixing these two problems, prngd starts as a system service
without a hitch.
Thank you both.
Rich
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