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Starting Acrobat Distiller as a Windows Service on Reboot

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BlueScr33n

Instructor
Feb 10, 2003
78
US
Thus far I've followed the instructions for creating a service found below (and customized the steps to use the acrodist.exe file as the executable). However, when I restart my computer (Windows XP Pro) the service doesn't initialize. The service is slated to start up automatically and has run with everything from local system account to admin.


1. Obtain the Srvany.exe and Instsrv.exe programs from the Windows NT Resource Kit.

2. For this example, we will assume your Adobe Distiller is located at "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Distillr\Acrodist.exe". However, there is no problem with having yours in a completely different location. Simply replace the applicable locations we use in this tutorial with wherever your server is located.

3. Place a copy of both "Srvany.exe" and "Instsrv.exe" into your Adobe Distiller folder ("C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Distillr\"). It is also valid to place these executables into your Windows folder, but for simplicity purposes, we are going to both assume and suggest you simply place them into the same folder as your Acrodist.exe.

4. Open a command prompt (click the Start menu, choose Programs, then Accessories, then MS-DOS Prompt. OR Start menu, choose Run, type "command", and click OK). In the command prompt window, type these commands INCLUDING the quotes:
cd "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Distillr\"
(But replace the location with the actual location of your Adobe Distiller folder.)
instsrv Distiller "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Distillr\srvany.exe"
(But replace "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Distillr\srvany.exe" with the actual location of your srvany.exe)

5. Run regedit.exe (click the Start Menu, choose Run, then type "regedit", and click OK) and browse to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Distiller
This "Key" (as it is called in the registry) was created by Instsrv when you executed that previous command; This is what Instsrv does for is. Without it, we would have had to create all of these Keys and Values ourselves.

6. Second-click on the " Distiller" key and click New -> Key. This will create a new sub-key under that key; Name it "Parameters" (without quotes).

7. Second-click on the "Parameters" key and click New -> String Value. This will create a new "Value" inside of that key; Name it "Application" (without quotes).

8. Double-click the Value for "Application" and enter the location of your Acrodist.exe -- for our tutorial we will enter "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Distillr\Acrodist.exe" (without quotes).

9. Now, open your Services control panel (located in the Administrative Tools folder) and look for your newly created Distiller service. Each individual service can be set to start up in a different manner. Second-click on the new service and click on "Properties" and you will see a dropdown list labeled "Startup Type" amongst other things. The 3 different settings are:

10. You may now close the properties window, and unless you set your service to "Disabled" (which would be silly, after all, Distiller is great) you may now second-click on it and click "Start".

11. You can now log off and attempt to connect to your server from another computer, and it should work.
 
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