Bad service!! BAD! STOP!!

Have you ever tried to stop or restart a Windows Server service when you couldn't afford to reboot because the CFO was in the middle of something "Financial" on the server and you like having a job? Well I have and on many occasions. Now what happens when that service doesn't want to stop?

SMTP service "stopping".... (get lunch and come back) SMTP service "stopping"....

Ugh.

Well if that service is an executable file then you can force it to stop with either the following command sequences:

taskkill /s hostname /IM ImageName /F

taskkill /PID ProcessID /F

But you say, "That's great, ServerGoBoom, but how do I figure out the ImageName or ProcessID for the &#^$%! service I want to kill .. er ... stop?"

Good question. You could do it one of a couple ways both involving the Windows Task Management systems, graphical and textual. :)

You can use Task Manager which provides a GUI view of the Process currently running on your system. If you don't already know, you can access this utility easily by right-clicking the Task bar (or Start Bar) and choosing Task Manager from the dropdown menu that appears.

Once you have it open, you'll notice that the Task Manager window has several tabs, one of which is Processes. Click this to put it in focus. If you don't see a column named PID then click the View option at the top of the window, click Select Columns ... then put a check in the box next to PID (Process Identifier) and click OK.



Now you can see which Services (Image Name column) match which PIDs (PID Column), plug in the info for the service that won't stop into the either of the command sequences quoted above and bingo. Bob's your uncle, Fanny's your aunt. Service stopped.

If you prefer the simplicity and stark beauty of the command-line as I do, then you can open the command prompt and use the tasklist command to generate a text-based table of the same info that looks like this:









Check out this link for the TechNet break-down on the Taskkill command:


http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725602(WS.10).aspx