Running Tunnelier as a Windows Service

On Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, it is possible to run a program as a system service. The advantage of services is that they can be started at boot time independently of any logon session, and will continue to run as users log on and off of the machine.

Frequently users would like to run Tunnelier as a service so that its port forwarding features would come into effect as soon as the machine boots and remain active regardless of users logging on and off of the machine. While Tunnelier itself does not run as a service, it can be encapsulated inside a program that enables this. One such program is FireDaemon by Sublime Solutions, another is the srvany utility included with the Windows NT/2000/2003 Resource Kits. The Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit can be installed also on Windows XP, and some guidance to using the srvany utility can be found in the MS Knowledge Base. FireDaemon may be somewhat easier to get started with but srvany should work too if set up correctly.

Tunnelier supports command-line parameters which can tell it to load a desired profile and connect to the target server immediately. Information about Tunnelier's command-line parameters is available from its log area immediately on start-up, as well as if you run Tunnelier from the command prompt with the /? parameter:

  C:\>Tunnelier /?

When configuring Tunnelier to run as a service this way, it must be set up to run under the Windows account of a user who has already used Tunnelier to connect to the target SSH server successfully. If this is not done and an arbitrary Windows account or the default Local System account is used, Tunnelier will hang on verification of the server's public key fingerprint, and the session will not be established. Likewise, if the server's public key changes, you will need to login interactively into the account under which you are running Tunnelier as a service, and use Tunnelier interactively to connect to the SSH server and verify and save its new public key.