I have a service which needs to run as local system in order to work properly. If I run it as a domain user or even local admin it doesn't work correctly. However I need network access to resources and this only happens when I run it as a domain user. I tried granting access to the network resources to machinename$ to no avail. Is it possible to grant the same privileges as local system to a domain user? If yes how?
EDIT
To be more precise I am able to run the service as a regular user. However the program depending on the service is not able to load all needed processes whereas when as local system I can. However, as local system the program does not have access to shares on the network.
Best Answer
The correct question would be: why exactly does your service needs to be run as system ?
Basically, unless you either build some kind of RPC proxy or change the program to be able to impersonate a domain user, you simply can't grant access to domain resources to the system account.
So, please try the following: download and run process monitor (procmon), set it up to register the activity of all processes involved and run them as local user. After this, check the log for any access denied (error code 5) result and come back with a result. At that point, we can start thinking about how to fix it through ACL changes or work around it.