Access Denied when backing up WINS on Windows Server 2008

 

As part of switching our services over to Windows Server 2008, we began migrating WINS and our management scripts for WINS.  Our existing Windows Server 2003 based backup script did not work.  It was returning an access denied error.

Firing up Process Monitor produced this report.

I couldn’t image how a windows service didn’t have permission to write to the filesystem.

Looking at the properties of the Process Monitor event shows this detail.

The user wasn’t NT Authority\System like I had expected.  Instead it was NT Authority\Local Service.  A search for NT Authority\Local Service and WINS produced KB Article 943514.  The article only references moving the database from its default location, but it also applies to backing up the database to another folder.  The access denied error is resolved by issuing a command like

icacls d:\backupWINS /grant "NT SERVICE\WINS:(OI)(CI)F"

Obviously this grants the WINS service full control of the d:\backupWINS folder so that it now has permissions to create its backup files.  With that in place, no more errors were encountered.