Service Control Manager (SCM)

As I alluded to previously, the Service Control Manager controls all services on the local machine. More concretely, the SCM has these five main jobs:

  • Maintains a database of installed services.

  • Processes requests for installation and removal of services.

  • Start services specified as "automatic startup" at boot.

  • Maintains a database of all running services and their status.

  • Accepts and forwards messages from users and other processes to the appropriate service. This includes things such as start and stop requests.

The services database appears in a part of the Registry familiar to all NT administrators: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services. Beneath this key are subkeys for each and every installed service, as shown ...

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