Greetings fellow monks.

I recently had to throw together a script which would kick-start a Windows service (scheduler).

This was due to a particularly overzealous IT department's user group policy disabling user-initiated services at seemingly random intervals.

Of course I'm too lazy to write timing into my all of my scripts. And I'm yearning for cron-like functionality. So here's what I put together:

# /usr/bin/perl
# child process to background
# poll windows service (scheduler) and re-enable + start

use Win32::Service;
use Win32::OLE;
use strict;

# set logfile location
my $logfile = 'log.txt';
my ($key, %service, %status);

while (1) {
    Win32::Service::GetStatus('','Schedule', \%status);
    if (!($status{CurrentState} == 4)) {
        # service probably disabled, set to automatic again
        set_starttype('automatic','schedule');
        Win32::Service::StartService('', 'Schedule') || die "could not
+ start service: $!\n";    
        open(LOG, '>>', $logfile);
        print LOG currtime() . "\tscheduler stop detected, restarted t
+he service\n";
        close LOG;
    }
    sleep(60);
}

# culled/tweaked from: http://unattended.sourceforge.net/
sub set_starttype {
    my ($type, $service_name) = @_;

    # Convert to lower-case
    $type = lc $type;
    $service_name = lc $service_name;
    
    my %types = map { (lc $_ => $_) } ('Boot', 'System', 'Automatic',
                                               'Manual', 'Disabled');
    
    (exists $types{$type})
        or die '<type> must be one of ', join ' ', keys %types;
    
    # Bomb out completely if COM engine encounters any trouble.
    Win32::OLE->Option ('Warn' => 3);
    
    # Get a handle to the SWbemServices object of the local machine.
    my $computer = Win32::OLE->GetObject ('WinMgmts:');
    
    # Get the SWbemObjectSet of all services.  See:
    # http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/wmisdk/wmi/win32_service
+.asp
    my $services_set = $computer->InstancesOf ('Win32_Service');
    
    # Convert set to a Perl array.
    my @services = Win32::OLE::Enum->All ($services_set);
    
    foreach my $service (@services) {
        my $name = $service->{'Name'};
        my $display_name = $service->{'DisplayName'};
        if (($service_name eq lc $name)
            || ($service_name eq lc $display_name)) {
            print "Setting mode for $name ($display_name) to $types{$t
+ype}...";
            my $ret = $service->ChangeStartMode ($types{$type});
            $ret == 0
                or die "Unable to ChangeStartMode to $types{$type}: $r
+et";
            print "done.\n";
        }
    }
}

sub currtime {
    my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localti
+me(time);
    return sprintf("[%02u/%02u/%u %02u:%02u:%02u]", $mon + 1, $mday, $
+year + 1900, $hour, $min, $sec);
}
[download]

Fork+exec it into the background and it's smooth sailing. Should note that polling frequency should be less than script frequency. I hope that someone will find it useful!