I want to install a monitoring system on a computer (the program is a jar file) and run it on start up every time any user logs on. However, I don’t want the user to be able to terminate it since then it won’t be able to be monitored any longer.
We have tried several ways:
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Installing it as a service – the problem here is that our program doesn’t work any longer; it can’t connect to the computer that’s monitoring it. We used “Yet Another Java Service Wrapper” for this, and looked into some other wrappers as well that could help us install it as a service.
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Running the program on start up (using the folder startup), but not giving the basic user the privileges to edit/delete/mess around with the files. However, this seems to slow the whole computer down? This doesn’t happen when we run the bat file executing the jar directly. Another issue with this is that the user can just go to the task manager and kill the java process.
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We tried a variation of the previous one to solve the issue of the process being killed, by having another process. One will spawn the other and these 2 processes will keep tabs on each other. If one terminates, the other detects it and runs it to start it up again. Although it can have issues if the user is fast enough in killing both processes before either is respawned again, the bigger issue is that it sometimes has problems with connecting to other computers. We didn’t have this problem when it was just 1 jar.
Does anyone have any idea on how these problems can be solved?
The context here is windows, but if you have suggestions for linux and mac that would be nice too!
Way to go is to run the program as a service. You should investigate any trouble between your application and your system’s firewall. If you have windows firewall activated, you should add an exception for java.exe or javaw.exe.
In order to give elevated privileges to your program, you can set the service to run as another user. You can do this from the “Log on” tab in the service properties.