Creating a Task and Running with Highest Privileges from Another Task,

Question

I've created a C# program which creates remote jobs, and then spawns follow-up processes every 5 minutes to check on the status of the remote job. This is accomplished with a mother task in task scheduler which creates child tasks.

It all runs fine as me on my local machine; However, in production I have 2 issues:

I can't get the spawned task to "Run whether user is logged on or not" - It requires that the user is logged on.
It's not getting created with the "Run with highest privileges" checked.

Here is the code I use to create the task from the mother task:

        {
            TaskService ts = new TaskService();
            TaskDefinition td = ts.NewTask();
            //td.Settings.RunOnlyIfLoggedOn = false;
            td.Principal.LogonType = TaskLogonType.S4U;
            td.Settings.AllowDemandStart = true;
            td.Settings.MultipleInstances = TaskInstancesPolicy.IgnoreNew;
            td.Principal.RunLevel = TaskRunLevel.Highest;
            td.RegistrationInfo.Description = taskDescription;
            td.Triggers.Add(new TimeTrigger(DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(5)));
            td.Actions.Add(action, arguments);
            Microsoft.Win32.TaskScheduler.Task th = ts.RootFolder.RegisterTaskDefinition(taskName, td);
        }

A few additional notes: - The mother task is set to run regardless if the user is logged on, and run with highest privileges. - The child task always appears like this:

I have seen several similar posts, but they all are missing the aspect of creating a task from a task.

Thanks!

user_985012 · Answer

This will run the Task with the highest privileges and if the user is logged on or not:

// Get the service on the local machine
using (TaskService ts = new TaskService())
{
    // Create a new task definition and assign properties
    TaskDefinition td = ts.NewTask();

    // Logged on or not with highest privileges 
    td.Principal.LogonType = TaskLogonType.S4U;
    td.Principal.RunLevel = TaskRunLevel.Highest;

    // Simple task to kill an application
    td.RegistrationInfo.Description = $"Kill application {key}";
    td.Triggers.Add(new TimeTrigger(DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(1))
    {
        Repetition = new RepetitionPattern(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5), TimeSpan.Zero)
    });
    td.Actions.Add(new ExecAction("taskkill", $"/F /IM {key}.exe", null));

    ts.RootFolder.RegisterTaskDefinition($"Kill {key}", td);
}

Creating a Task and Running with Highest Privileges from Another Task,

1 Answers