If you are not going to be
using Interface Configuration Utility to manage this
interface, you can manually from the
command prompt install the interface to run as a service.
To be honest on a scale of 1 to 10, where
10 is the most important, I think this is about a 2 in importance.
Very few people need to do this
to actually use this from the command prompt. But this
is the older way, and I will show you how to do this. You might have
actually had folks do this at your site already. The
way you would do this is you would go ahead
and type the name of the executable, that's the interface,
with the -install switch. And then you would choose a bunch of
options like auto, display, name,
dependencies, service ID etc. So those are some of the
switches and when you are finished, you will
see that that interface has been configured as a service.
Now again, if you are not familiar with services do not
worry. This is a brand new topic for most people that are
not used to managing Windows resources. Let me show you what I
mean by a service. I am going to go into
Control Panel and within Control
Panel choose Administrative Tools. I am going to look at the
Services applet. Let's make this a little bigger.
The services applet,
it's the applet that shows you what services are currently installed.
So services like TCPIP run all the
time, whether you are logged in or not. So that's what we mean by a service. It's
an application that is going to run
apart from any user
who has started it. So for example, these
PI Services on the server side,
these are things that are going to be
run automatically. Now actually PI is
installed on this machine but it's not currently running.
That's why you see none of these are running here. I am just
using this as an interface node now.
Now let's take a look at the
PI SNMP interface. It is not currently listed as a service. We
see some other interfaces listed.
PIPerfMon, PIPing etc.
So how do I add
a service if I do not go through
Service Configuration Utility?
What you would do is
first launch a command window.
I will go ahead and type in cmd.
This is the command window. And from here I am
going to change directories to
the directory that
has the interface. So I will change it to
Program Files and change the directory to PIPC.
And then change directory to Interfaces
and now I would like to use as an example,
it's called the SNMP interface.
If you look at this directory,
this is under interfaces
and it is called SNMP
and this is the name of the executable
PISNMP. That is not currently installed
as a service. So I can install it to run as a
service by doing
PISNMP.exe
-install. And now I can
choose whatever install options
I want. For example, I would like to automatically
start whenever the Operating System
starts. And I can also
specify that the dependency... There is a dependency
on the process called BuffServ.
Or the service called BuffServ.
And what that did is it just installed this as a
service. As you see, we are using the interface itself to install
itself as a service. And
now if we switch over to the services
applet, and I refresh this, I do not see PISNMP
yet. But if I refresh this, there it is.
Here is the service name, it's called PISNMP.
As you can see, it's set for auto-start.
So that's the old fashioned way of doing it I guess
I should say.... The command prompt way of doing this.
But we will show you in a few minutes how to set this up using
Interface Configuration Utility.