Why won’t the service start as local system

There doesn't appear to be a GUI-based way of doing this unless you're joined to a domain - at least not one I could find anywhere - so I did a bit more digging and I've found an answer that works for our situation.

I didn't understand what the string representation meant in the knowledge base article, but doing a bit of digging led me to discover that it's SDDL syntax. Further digging led me to this article by Alun Jones which explains how to get the security descriptor for a service and what each bit means. MS KB914392 has more details.

To append to the service's existing security descriptor, use sc sdshow "Service Name" to get the existing descriptor. If this is a plain old .NET Windows Service - as is the case with ours - the security descriptor should look something like this:

D:(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;SY)(A;;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;BA)(A;;CCLCSWLOC
RRC;;;IU)(A;;CCLCSWLOCRRC;;;SU)(A;;CR;;;AU)(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;PU)S:(AU;FA
;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;WD)

We needed to grant permissions RP (to start the service), WP (to stop the service), DT (to pause/continue the service) and LO (to query the service's current status). This could be done by adding our service account to the Power Users group, but I only want to grant individual access to the account under which the maintenance service runs.

Using runas to open a command prompt under the service account, I ran whoami /all which gave me the SID of the service account, and then constructed the additional SDDL below:

(A;;RPWPDTLO;;;S-x-x-xx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxx-xxxx)

This then gets added to the D: section of the SDDL string above:

D:(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;SY)(A;;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;BA)(A;;CCLCSWLOC
RRC;;;IU)(A;;CCLCSWLOCRRC;;;SU)(A;;CR;;;AU)(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;PU)(A;;RPWP
DTLO;;;S-x-x-xx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxx-xxxx)S:(AU;FA;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOC
RSDRCWDWO;;;WD)

This is then applied to the service using the sc sdset command (before the S: text):

sc sdset "Service Name" D:(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;SY)(A;;CCDCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;BA)(A;;
CCLCSWLOCRRC;;;IU)(A;;CCLCSWLOCRRC;;;SU)(A;;CR;;;AU)(A;;CCLCSWRPWPDTLOCRRC;;;PU
)(A;;RPWPDTLO;;;S-x-x-xx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxx-xxxx)S:(AU;FA;CCDCLCSW
RPWPDTLOCRSDRCWDWO;;;WD)

If all goes according to plan, the service can then be started, stopped, paused and have it's status queried by the user defined by the SID above.

The Microsoft Windows Service Control Manager controls the state (i.e., started, stopped, paused, etc.) of all installed Windows services. By default, the Service Control Manager will wait 30,000 milliseconds (30 seconds) for a service to respond. Certain configurations, technical restrictions, or performance issues may result in the service taking longer than 30 seconds to start and report ready to the Service Control Manager.

By editing or creating the ServicesPipeTimeout DWORD value, the Service Control Manager timeout period can be overridden, thereby giving the service more time to start up and report ready to the service.

How to make it ?

1. Go to Start > Run > and type regedit
2. Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
3. With the control folder selected, right click in the pane on the right and select new DWORD Value
4. Name the new DWORD: ServicesPipeTimeout
5. Right-click ServicesPipeTimeout, and then click Modify
6. Click Decimal, type '180000', and then click OK
7. Restart the computer

Note: The recommendation above increases the timeout to 180,000 milliseconds (3 minutes), but this may need to be increased further depending on your environment. Keep in mind that increasing this value will likely yield longer server boot times.