Forums mIRC Help Running mIRC as Windows Service

It would be really helpful if I could run mIRC as Windows service. Has anybody had any experience of configuring mIRC to run as Windows service?

Thanks in advance.

Tony

do u mean /run c:\MIRC\mirc.exe -service
at startup?

Thats a Windows 9x pseudo-service, not a real Windows NT service. mIRC does not have NT service support.

i didnt realize there was a difference t/y for correcting me. could u explain the difference in alil more detail?

Sure. A 9x service means one thing, when you click the "log off" button to log off the given username, the program continues to run, and when you log back in, the program is still there. Personally though, I used Win9x for maybe 5-6 years, and I never once used the log off feature, and I don't know of many people that do. Pretty much it's not really a commonly used feature, Microsoft barely even mentions that the feature exists.

The NT service is much more complex. Most NT services run in the background; they have no user interaction. They start when Windows starts (unless configured not to). A service can allow user interaction, although Microsoft says it can lead to problems because thats not really what it was designed for. Some examples of services would be any kind of server software, IIS for example. Usually, by making a program run as a service it becomes faster and more stable. This is because there is no code running each time the mouse moves, or each time you type a letter, or anything like that, and usually it is more stable simply because interface coding gets really ugly and it can lead to errors.

I have used FireDaemon to make mIRC services for a while with no problems.

Anyone know of any other apps to run mirc as a service? (freeware) need to be able to run more than one mirc client at the same time..

I am also curious about this. I have a computer running windows server 2003 and would like to run an irc bot. i tried using instsrv with srvany. it starts the service and doesn't report any error, but since there is no visible version of mirc, i can't tell what happens and i never see it connect to the server. i've tried configuring it so that it automatically joins the server and channel via command line, scripts, and mirc.ini. none of those work. anyways, if anyone has an idea please share. thanks.

sorry to "bump" an old thread. But, I just got mIRC.exe loaded as a system service using the srvany/instsrv approach but Im not seeing any signs of mIRC connecting to my office's irc server through netstat, or my firewall. Any ideas?

mirc.exe and srvany.exe are both in my processes list
I've confirmed the prescense of the "mirc" service in services.msc, with Path to executable set to C:\mIRC\srvany.exe

I've set the service up using the guide from Microsoft: How To Create a User-Defined Service

But yea, I've rebooted, and am not seeing any connection activity from mirc.

Is there a needed parameter to force mIRC to connect?

Normally, when I launch mirc.exe, it automatically connects to my server just fine.

Thanks in advance.

I've been doing something for some time now using the $cmdline identifier. You can make a copy of mIRC and set for it to automatically minimize to the tray at startup so that it *looks* like a service and then include commands in the command line. I do this for special text files. What I do is give them a special extension (such as '.secure' or whatever) and then tell that extension to run into mIRC with the command "mirc.exe run txt". The part where it says "run txt" is what pops up in $cmdline and you can use that for instructions. The drawback is that you have to start it up for every command (unless you want to make a long stream of them in the command line), but you can also make mIRC immediately exit after the given commands are performed. I use this to put a password on pretty much any text file I want (or any file at all really), including the scripts that are the key to it all. If anyone's got any questions, you can email me at ryastew@comcast.net and I should be able to help you out.