[stunnel-users] No Taskbar Icon

Thu Sep 25 00:29:04 CEST 2014

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 20:10:58 +0200
Pierre DELAAGE <delaage.pierre at free.fr> wrote:

> Ok, this is a fact that a service should not have to interact with the 
> desktop, and the icon is a part of that...
> It is normal, in stunnel case, that it does not appear: if it were the 
> case it may allow the user to stop the service, which is not the purpose 
> of any service...
> 
> BUT, even in service mode, stunnel does interact with the desktop in two 
> ways :
> 
> 1/ when you start or stop the service : there is a dlg box at that time
> 2/ if you have protected your client cert with a password, you will be 
> prompted to enter a password
> 
> What is strange is that MS maintained the existence of the checkbox in 
> the Win7 service dialog...
> 
> Anyway...at least you should have a normal icon when starting stunnel in 
> user mode ...
> 

Hi,

As soon or later I plan to change to Windows 7 I couldn't believe
what you were talking and... angry is the less I had after some tests.

What to do? search, search, and search and I couldn't believe no one
found a workaround :(

But I ended in this MSDN blog that bring the hint:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patricka/archive/2010/04/27/what-is-interactive-services-detection-and-why-is-it-blinking-at-me.aspx

It is not the best workaround and not the safer if I could say
something, but works. By the way, I created the service with srvany
from the resource kits, not with the own stunnel service installer,
but should work that way too as it creates the service that is the
important thing.

The thing consist in bypass the interactive service checks and blocks
by running PsExec in the following method (use your own paths) for
the image path of the service or parameters if you used srvany:

PsExec -i 1 -s stunnel.exe

After create the service and modified the above command to run, go to
service manager, check the properties of the service and set to run
your login credentials instead the system account.

If all went well, you'll run stunnel, you'll see the icon in the
taskbar and you should check the log window (I had some problem where
I could open but couldn't see it).

Note: you won't be able to kill stunnel stopping the service.

I didn't check more things, as if in boot it runs or not because I'm
running in a humble P4 system with a slower virtual machine, but
after a couple of hours I was satisfied enough, at least viewing the
icon appear and I wanted to share this with you.

Of course, this would help too to those malware creators reaching the
list, but, who cares? I almost prefer a wild zone instead this
security by default Windows where you can't do anything without
permission, even if you disable every thing outthere. The nightmare
of every system tech.

Regards.