This short post deals with security and permission-related aspects of External Activator.
When you install External Activator, you are asked to choose the service account (the Windows account that External Activator service will run as). The choice is from well-known Windows service accounts and a custom user with a password. For more information on the well-known accounts, please refer Sql Server Books Online or MSDN pages. The recommended service account for External Activator is a local or domain user.
The External Activator setup application will also create one or two (depending on the Operating System) local security groups for administrative purposes.
The first group, SSB EA Admin , is created regardless of the OS used. Members of this group have permission to start/stop the service, view the trace (log) file and modify the configuration file. The purpose of this group is to provide sufficient privilege separation so that the user(s) configuring and running External Activator doesn’t have to be a box admin.
The second group, SSB EA Service , is only created on down-level OSes and its purpose is to make changing External Activator’s service account easier (more on that below).
On newer OSes (starting from Vista/Server 2008) changing External Activator’s service account is as simple as setting the new account in Services MMC snap-in (Win-R –> services.msc). The reason it works is that ACLs on External Activator’s files are created based on Service SID, which is independent of service’s “real” service account (more about Per Service SID can be found
here
). On down-level OSes using the Services MMC snap-in is not enough, because changing the External Activator’s service account there won’t automatically change the file ACLs to the new account. This is something you need to do yourself, but in order to make it easier, the
SSB EA Service
local group has been introduced. The files are ACLed to be accessible by members of
SSB EA Service
group rather than by the External Activator’s service account directly. Therefore, when changing service account, it’s enough to add the new account to that group (and possibly remove the old one), without the need to actually touch any file ACLs. You can do that from a command line window:
net localgroup “SSB EA Service” /add “<new account name>”
net localgroup “SSB EA Service” /delete “<old account name>”
One of the previous posts provided a detailed description of all the Sql Server permissions that External Activator needs in order to work properly. It all starts with creating a Sql Server login for External Activator to use. There are several options how this login may be created, depending on the topology of the services:
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