Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

FWIW:

In past releases of EPICS if windows is built debug, during development, then the caRepeater process is created with an associated console window, which makes it easier to stop. I have also, in the past, added an explicit caRepeater process kill commandl to my  build script, on windows.

Jeff

From: Tech-talk <[email protected]> on behalf of Johnson, Andrew N. via Tech-talk <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2020 3:36:17 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Killing caRepeater on Windows 10

On 1/14/20 12:19 AM, Michael Davidsaver wrote:

Has anyone ever spun caRepeater as a windows service?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/services/svc-cpp

It looks like processes have to explicitly say that they should be run as a service for the standard Microsoft tool 'sc create' to work. However I have just managed to set up our standard caRepeater.exe to start automatically on my system using NSSM - the Non-Sucking Service Manager (great name!) which seems to be the recommended way to do this. I actually installed it with

C:\>choco install nssm

I love Chocolatey, it makes installing software on Windows so much easier than doing it by hand. Then created and started the new service using

C:\>nssm install "CA Repeater" C:\epics\bin\caRepeater.exe
C:\>nssm start "CA Repeater"

Now the repeater appears in the task manager as a background process, and should start automatically whenever the machine comes up. The nssm will also restart it if it ever dies for some reason.

Note that I copied a statically built caRepeater.exe into the above directory, I don't want to use the binary from one of my build directories because I'd have to stop and restart the service every time I rebuilt that copy of Base. You can use the caRepeater.exe from any version of Base, they all do exactly the same thing.

HTH,

- Andrew

-- 
Complexity comes for free, Simplicity you have to work for.