Installing the A-Shell Telnet Service manually is not difficult, but there are a few potential obstacles that these tips will help you avoid.

•  Vista Elevation: In order to install or uninstall a service under Vista, you must start from an elevated context. The easiest way to achieve this is to Click the Start button and type "cmd" into the search line, then hit CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER, which will open an elevated command prompt window. If you fail to do this, the atsdsrv command lines will probably fail, without giving you any feedback.

•  Use the Services applet to confirm your progress. Open it from Control Panel > Adminstrative Tools > Services and start by confirming that A-Shell Telnet Service is not already running. (If it is, and you want to update it, you’ll need to uninstall it first, with the atsdsrv –u command.) But note that the Services applet does not dynamically refresh the list of services, so after installing or uninstalling, close it and re-open it to confirm that the operation succeeded.

•  Use the log files, ATSDSRV.LOG and ATSD.LOG. The former will note issues with installing the service, while the latter will note events relating to the actual A-Shell Telnet Service (i.e. ATSD.EXE, which is the module that accepts the telnet requests and launches new A-Shell sessions.) The location of the ATSDSRV.LOG file will always be the same as the location of the ATSDSRV.EXE file, while the location (and existence) of the ATSD.LOG file is determined by the –l logfilespec switch in the ATSDSRV.INI file.

•  Other Vista obstacles: The ATSD user interface may be hidden in a virtual desktop. So the only feedback you get may be in the log (see previous note). Also, the ATSD.EXE process may not show in the Task Manager process list. So if in doubt, you may need to verify that is running by the combination of the Services applet, the ATSD.LOG file, and netstat (see next).

•  To determine whether the A-Shell Telnet Service is actually waiting for telnet requests, use netstat –a –p tcp. You should see an entry which lists the port that you declared (default 23, or set via the –p ## switch in the ATSDSRV.INI CommandLine entry), and which is in the LISTENING state.

•  See Troubleshooting for further tips.