Stop restart loop in kiosk mode with crashing application - powershell

I have a Windows 10 LTSB 2016 machine set up in kiosk mode to run a single application. I followed the Powershell instructions at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/configuration/kiosk-shelllauncher#configure-a-custom-shell-using-powershell to build the install script, it works well. In that script, I can set the behavior of the shell if the application crashes. I can restart the application, restart the PC, or shut down the PC.
In general, this is all good, but occasionally someone does something like edit a file that causes the application to instantly crash on starting. Because I have the script set to restart the application, this causes the shell to get stuck in a loop where the application is rapidly crashing and restarting. This fills my logs and is generally a poor UX for the end user.
I'd like to condition the behavior so the application only attempts to restart a limited number of times, then shuts down (or some other behavior). Is there any way to achieve this? Can the custom shell access a counter, or accept a return statement from the application (e.g. to differentiate between an intended application shutdown/restart vs an application crash)?

Related

Windows Services - How can I find the darktable instance in windows services

I accidentally screwed up my darktable configuration, so I reloaded it from scratch. To avoid losing all my recorded changes I have done to my pictures, I wrote a powershell backup script for the darktable database. I want to launch this script from the windows task scheduler when ever I launch darktable. I have found the event id which indicates in the security log of a new process has occurred which I should be able to use to automatically launch my backup script from task scheduler. I want to add code to the script to check the services to see if darktable is actually running and only perform the backup if it is. Anyone know how I can identify this?

Running Flask at startup as a Service in Windows won't work in background

Before explaining what my problem is, please know that I have looked up for solutions on similar topics but none of them seems to work nor even to corresponds to my problem.
What I am trying to do:
I have this python code on multiple files that I run with flask with the following command:
python -m flask run --host=0.0.0.0
So far, everything works, but I would like this code to automatically run everytime the computer boots. In the future this will be used on mini PCs without any graphical interface nor human intervention.
Since I need to do some configuration checks before running the web server, I've created a powershell script that ends with Flask running (using the previous command).
So far, everything works too. Now we're coming to the problem:
I'd like this script to run when I boot the machine. Specificity: Every things needs to work with Administrator privileges, on the local system without any interaction.
I've tried scheduled tasks but Flask won't run even if the rest of the script works (like creating folders or other things)
Ok, it's not a big deal I have other ways to do it, so I've created a Windows Service in C# to run the Script at startup on the local system.
The script works, I've checked the privileges too, everything's fine but arriving at the flask command line that is supposed to make it run, nothing works.
It's the same thing if I run flask using "pythonw" which is supposed to run python as a background process.
What the problem seems to be:
Well, as long as I run flask and I have either a command prompt or a powershell terminal, everything works greats. But if in a way or another I run the script as a background process, it won't work.
Normally it would take around 30 seconds for Flask to start-up. Here if I try to create a folder right after flask ended starting up (as a test) I can see the folder is created almost instantly, which means the process is immediately killed.
The problem doesn't seem to come from the service itself but really Windows that kills the process I don't know why
I'm running out of idea so if you guys have anything that I could try it would really help me.

How to run a powershell script on startup in safe mode as an administrator

At the company I work for, we use Bit9 as part of our security stack. We are in the process of upgrade the version to 8.0 (and eventually 8.2) on all of our devices. Between the automatic upgrades and a different script I wrote, I was able to upgrade about 1000. But there are still about 700 left where the CLI password from Bit9 is not working, and the devices are not checking in to allow auto upgrade.
Bit9 has come back and suggested the following:
Boot the endpoint into Safe Mode w/ Networking
Run a script that executes the following Administrative commands from a CMD prompt (please note the proper spacing between start= disabled):
sc config parity start= disabled
sc config paritydriver start= disabled
Boot into Normal Mode
I've written a script that is supposed to do all of this, except I cannot for the life of me get the script to run once the device starts in safe mode. I've tried everything that I can think of:
HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
Placing a batch file in the Startup folder
Scheduled task
Nothing I do is working.
And one other caveat, the user that is logging in (safe mode & normal mode) is not an administrator. It is a regular user. I am kicking off the initial script with BigFix, which does run as an administrator.
Thanks in advance.
I was finally able to get it to work. The service idea was the starting point, though instead of creating a "fake" service, I actually wrote a service in C# that calls the PS script. I was then able to edit the registry, where I made that service able to start in safe mode. That seemed to do the trick. Now the only issue is that I can't seem to disable safe mode programmatically, but I will ask that as a separate question.

How to restart an exe when it is exits in windows 10?

I have a process in windows which i am running in startup. Now i need to make it if somehow that process get killed or stopped i need to restart it again in Windows 10?
Is there any way. Process is a HTTP server which if somehow stopped in windows i need to restart it. I have tried of writing a power-shell in which I'll check task-list status of process and then if not found I'll restart but that is not a good way. Please suggest some good way to do it.
I have a golang exe; under a particular scenario my process got killed or stopped i need to start it up again automatically. This has to be done imediately after the exe got killed. What is the best way to achieve this?
I will give you a brief rundown. You can enable Audit Process Termination in local group policy of the machine as shown below. In your case, success audits would be enough. Please note that the pic is for Windows 7. It may change with OS.
Now every time a process gets terminated, a success event will be generated and written to the security eventlog.
This will allow you to create a task scheduler that triggers on the generation of this event that calls a script that would run the process again. Simple right?
Well, you might have some trouble setting that task up especially when you want to pass details about the generating event to the script. This should help you get through that.
You can user Task scheduler for this purpose. There is a option of "restart on failure" which can be selected and whenever your process get failed it will restart again.
Reference :- https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/4545361c-cc1f-4505-a0a1-c2dcc094109a/restarting-scheduled-task-that-has-failed?forum=winserverManagement

iot-core custom oem image/ffu: crashing only in custom oem/ffu image. Bottom line: looking for a unique board ID

We have an iot-core UWP, headless app that runs fine (for months, hundreds of devices) when deployed directly from Visual Studio 2015 or as an App onto the retail iot-core distribution. In order to avoid over-air-update problems caused by recent automatic iot-core updates, we are trying to get a custom oem image/ffu built and deployed to the microsoft store. However, even after walking through the documentation/examples in detail, our app is still crashing when we deploy our oem image/ffu.
UPDATE
OK, no debugger still, but I found where it crashes, now is the question why the oem-ffu behaves differently from the side-deployed code (our code is identical) Since iot-core/UWP provices no way to get the board-UUID, I use the MAC of the primary network interface. To get this, I use this http://embedded101.com/BruceEitman/entryid/676/Windows-10-IoT-Core-Getting-the-MAC-Address-from-Raspberry-Pi which requires that a webserver be running, which it normally is, otherwise the console webapp would not work. However, on the OEM-Custom-Build-Version I get a crash in this routine. I don't know where since I can't debug, but it crashes, and I get a null back, which causes my azure storage connect to crash. I do not block processing since I have a retry loop... Anyway, what is the difference or what must we do to enable this code to also work in the OEM build?
The grass roots issue is: all I really need is a unique ID for the RPi board from somewhere... which does not seem possible via C#!? See How to get the processor serial number of Raspberry PI 2 with Windows IOT
So it looks like my MAC-Address solution above was the best we can expect at the moment, but doesn't work on the oem build. Why?
If your purpose is to avoid problem with auto update, you can use powershell script or putty to disable auto-update. Will that work for you?
Below is the command line you can use to disable auto-update,
Use powershell or putty to connect to pi using administrator
sc.exe config wuauserv start=disabled
sc.exe query wuauserv
sc.exe stop wuauserv
sc.exe query wuauserv
REG.exe QUERY HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wuauserv /v Start