Problems with OpenProcess while not in IDE - delphi

I created an application to watch my other applications and it run perfect while I'm debugging a console or vcl application.
When I try to watch a service application it give me some problems, I noticed that I got "Access denied" when I try to "OpenProcess(PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION, False, PID);".
But if open my watcher by Delphi IDE I don't have this problem.
Some one know what can it be ?
My intention is to open the process to get its GetProcessTimes, to check how much of memory it's consuming.
I know that procexp.exe from SysInternal can do it without problems, some one know how do they do it ?
Tks in advice.
Obs: In my machine I disabled the UAC and I executed the watcher as administrator.
New information:
I found that to access a service as want I do to other kind of application I must use OpenService. Now I can access it without problems, now I'll search a similar command of GetProcessTimes to it.

Resolved, I continue using OpenProcess but I used PROCESS_QUERY_LIMITED_INFORMATION (0x1000) to access it. The problem was just permission, using this I can access the process and use GetProcessTimes to get what I needed.
Tks all.

Related

Start electron app with admin privileges as default

I created an electron app which can only be started as admin, because it needs it for various command executions. Now it prompts that it must be started as admin.
This question was very helpful.
Now I want to start it with admin privileges right away so windows asks for the acception. It shouldn't be able to start the app without admin privileges.
I tried adding --win32metadata.requested-execution-level=requireAdministrator, but then it writes an error on startup (always):
The application has failed to start because the side by side configuration is incorrect.
How can I achive this with the electron packager?
Your electron-packager code looks fine, and the switch works for me.
This can happen if you are missing Visual C++ Runtimes, or if they're corrupted. Try installing them from here and try again.
If that doesn't help, then you should dig into the Event Viewer, which should come installed on your machine, and see what the specific error is. This page has some additional tips on troubleshooting this issue.

Windows service application self-defense in Delphi ( rad studio )

I am building a Windows service app using Delphi , RAD Studio 10
Upon my investigation I came across with a Eset Windows service which wonderfully was protecting itself from being Stopped or terminated.
On stopping the service using (windows service manager) or (end process button)
or (end task button) following error messages occurs :
The operation couldn't be completed.
access denied.
same thing is true with its registry keys . The error message is :
Can not delete info: Error while deleting key
I tested Administrator access and system access. in both cases i was not successful.
I want to build such self-defense mechanism for my own application protecting my service and registry key.
Any idea would be helpful.
Thank you for your time.
update :
I want to know how i can do it in Delphi ... that's why it is tagged Delphi
and If someone wants to stop the service or uninstall it ....
he or she can just use my own applications UI to do it.
edit 2 :
As Remko mentioned I thnk DACL and ACL is better way to handle it , I couldn't find any good reference for it. Is there any good reference for Delphi language?
Protecting from SCM stop is very easy. Assuming you are using TService, you can handle the TService.OnStop event and set its Stopped parameter to False. And assign an error code to the TService.ErrCode or TService.Win32ErrCode property.
Unless you are writing security software, you really should not protect from TaskManager termination. Admins should be allowed to kill misbehaving processes. That being said, you can use SetSecurityInfo() to assign a DACL to your service process that grants/denies access to particular users and/or groups as needed.
You can also use ChangeServiceConfig2() to configure your service's "failure actions" to restart the service if it terminates unexpectedly.
To protect your Registry key, you can use the lpSecurityAttributes parameter of RegCreateKeyEx(), or use the RegSetKeySecurity() function, to assign a SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR to your key that contains a DACL that grants/denies access to particular users and/or groups as needed.

How to delete a file that is using by windows?

Is there any way to delete a file when its using by any program or other process in windows?
I searched and found this 2 ways:
1- using RunOnce key in Registry;
I'm not gonna use this because i dont want to wait for windows restart or anything else... prefer to do it ontime!
2- using the way declared in this page: http://www.delphipages.com/forum/showthread.php?t=201190
the problem here is its useful under NT windows, i need a way works on all Windowses!
Thank you.
the problem here is its useful under NT windows, i need a way works on all Windowses!
All modern desktop Windowses (XP, Vista, 7) are also NT. Do you really need to work with NT<4 or Win98? Or even Win CE/Mobile/Phone? Probably not.
If you need to delete an open file straight away, about the only thing you can do is attach to each process using debugger privileges, see if it has any handles open on the file, and if so close them underneath it. You can do this the manual way using eg Process Explorer. Many applications won't react well to having their files closed on them; expect them to exception out when they try to do something with the dead handle.
Unfortunately there is no option in Windows to have Unix-style files that can exist attached to a file handle independently of being stored under a filename on disc.
You cant delete a file when someone is using it. No matter how hard you try, windows will not let you. It can work with some files, but in general it does not work.
What you can try is postpone the deletion, when no one is using the file. You can:
1 - use RunOnce, but you dont want that.
2 - Wait in a loop, trying to delete the file. Pseudo code:
DeleteFile
Check if you was able to delete or if file still exists.
if you are able to delete, then exit loop.
That is the best you can do, and what i could remeber.
Try MoveFileEx with MOVEFILE_DELAY_UNTIL_REBOOT flag. Will postpone move or delete action until reboot.
Edit:
If you don't whant to restart the only option is to close those handles. ProcessExplorer does that and works all the time and I have not seen any process to crash. See more info about enumeration handles in a process at
http://www.codeguru.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-176997.html. But keep in mint that you should enumerate all processes in the system and behave different on Vista+ (you need to be elevated)
Your files are most likely locked because some process has a handle open to them. That is the most common reason for the Access denied result when deleting or moving a file.
A really blunt way is to close that handle.
Then Handles tool from SysInternals (you can download the sources too) can do that for you: I have been successfully using that.
Note 1: You need administrative privileges to use it.
Note 2: Closing a handle from another process is considered very rude, and can make that process unstable.

How can I detect a debugger or other tool that might be analysing my software?

A very simple situation. I'm working on an application in Delphi 2007 which is often compiled as 'Release' but still runs under a debugger. And occasionally it will run under SilkTest too, for regression testing. While this is quite fun I want to do something special...
I want to detect if my application is running within a debugger/regression-tester and if that's the case, I want the application to know which tool is used! (Thus, when the application crashes, I could report this information in it's error report.)
Any suggestions, solutions?
You can check the parent process that started your application.
With CreateToolhelp32Snapshot/Process32First/Process32Next get the parent PID (PROCESSENTRY32.th32ParentProcessID or TProcessEntry32.th32ParentProcessID) for your application PID. Then get the filename for the parent PID to compare with the applications you want to check for, like SilkTest.
Check this article for code usage.
In addition to IsDebuggerPresent and CheckRemoteDebuggerPresent, you can also query PEB.BeingDebugged (PEB is Process Environment Block, to get PEB you must query TEB, which is the Thread Enviroment Block).
You're probably looking for the IsDebuggerPresent function.
To detect SilkTest, you could try to attach to a DLL which is used only by SilkTest in order to detect its presence. For example, if the Open Agent is attached to a process, Win32HookDll_x86.dll or Win32HookDll_amd64.dll will be present (the names can be easily found out with a tool like Process Explorer.
You can also do
if DebugHook <> 0 then ...

Starting a windows service fails with error 1053

I have a windows service that is failing to start, giving an error "Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion".
Running the service in my debugger works fine, and if I double click on the the service .exe on the remote machine a console window pops up and continues to run without problem - I can even see log messages showing me that the program is processing everything the way it should be.
The service had been running fine previously, though this is my first time, personally, trying to deploy it with the most recent changes made to the program. I've evaluated those changes and cant figure out how they might cause this problem, particuarly since everything runs fine when not started as a service.
The StartRoutine() method of the service impelmentation is empty, so should be returning in a "timely fashion".
I've checked the event logs on the computer, and it doesn't give any additional information other than it didn't hear back from the service in the 30 second requisite time frame.
Since it works on my machine, and as a double-clicked executable, how would I go about figuring out why it fails as a service?
Oh, and it's .NET 2.0, so it shouldn't be affected by the 1.1 framework bug that exhibited this symptom (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/839174)
The box is a windows server 2003 R2 machine running SP2.
This is a misleading error. It's probably an unhandled exception.
Empty your OnStart() handler then try this in your constructor...
public MainService()
{
InitializeComponent();
try
{
// All your initialization code goes here.
// For instance, my exception was caused by the lack of registry permissions
;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
EventLog.WriteEntry("Application", ex.ToString(), EventLogEntryType.Error);
}
}
Now check the EventLog on your system for your Application Error.
Could be a number of things and it might help to get a stack trace on the machine exhibiting the problem. There are a number of ways to do this but the point is that you have to see where this is failing in the code.
You can do this with remote debugging, but a simple thing might be to just log to the event logger, or file log if you have that. Literally, putting "WriteLine("At class::function()") throughout portions of the code to see if you've made it there.
This will at least get you looking in the right direction (which ultimately is the code).
Update:
See Microsoft's How to Debug Windows Services article for details in troubleshooting startup problems using WinDbg.
This related question details nice ways to debug services that are written in .NET.
I agree with Scott, the easiest way to find out what's happening is to put some traces in the start-up code (maybe it doesn't even come to your start-up code).
If this doesn't help, you can post your code here so others can take a look.
perhaps lacking some dependence, try this :
- deregister your service
- register again
If fail at register means that lack an module.
If the StartRoutine is empty, you are probably starting it somewhere else.
IIRC you need to fire off a worker thread, and then return from StartRoutine.
One of the problems which may lead to this error is if windows service which needs to be deployed consists of some error i.e it may be simple authorization error or anything as in my case I have referenced some folders and files for logging which were not existing, but when provided the right path of those file and folders it solved my problem.
I ran through every post on this particular subject and none of the responses solved the problem, so I'm adding this response in case this helps someone else. Admittedly this only applies to a new service, not this specific case.
I was writing a File listening service. As a console app, it worked perfectly. When I ran it as a service, I got the same error as above. What I didn't know (and many of the MSDN articles about services conveniently leave out) is that you need to have your class executed from within ServiceBase.Run( YourClassName());. Otherwise, your app executes and immediately terminates and because it terminated, you get the error above even if no error or exception occurred. Here is a link to an article about this. It actually discusses setting up your app for dual use - Console app and service: Create a combo command line / Windows service app
I had that issue and the source of my problem was config file. I edited it in notepad and notepad added one special character which cause service not to run properly because config file was ruined. I saw that special character in notepadd++ and after delete it, service started to run successfully as previous did.
In my case, the correct .NET framework was not installed on the server that I was installing the Windows service on.
One other reason is If you copy the DLL in 'debug' mode to installation folder this issue will come.What you need to do is Run the project in 'Release' mode copy the DLL or directly form Release folder rather than Debug folder,,and copy that DLL in to installation folder,it will work.You can see the reduction in size of DLL ,it will not contain any debug symbols and like that

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