How Does Service Account Manager Deal With Dependencies?

When Service Account Manager (SAM) examines a service or attempts to manipulate a service it also gathers information about what services depend on this service. This means if you stop/restart a service that has services that depend on it, and those services are currently running as well, Service Account Manager will stop those services from the top down until we get to the service you actually wish to manipulate. Then we will restart those services in the correct order from the bottom to the top.

Conversely, if you attempt to stop/restart a service that depends on other services, Service Account Manager will also attempt to start those required services automatically if they are not already running.

A simple example is the clipbook service. The clipbook service depends on Network DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange), which in turn depends on Network DDE DSDM (Distributed Share Database Manager). If you set all of these services to manual but do not start them, then if you use SAM to attempt to start the clipbook service, you will then see that in order, Network DDE DSDM is started, followed by Network DDE, and finally with clipbook.

If after that you restart Network DDE DSDM, you can watch our log, your task manager, or your event logs, and see that clipbook is stopped, followed by Network DDE, then Network DDE DSDM. Then during the startup process, we start Network DDE DSDM, Network DDE, and then clipbbok. We need to start the two services after restarting Network DDE DSDM because they are running when you issue the restart command.