XNET.EXE

The NET.EXE command refined

The NET.EXE command surely is one of the most often employed by Windows NT administrators. By using net start and net stop it's possible to list and manage active services. The command has its limitations though. It lacks functionality to set startup mode for services, show services which are not started, show detailed information about a service and its dependencies, its name in short form, its filename and more. NET.EXE is also incapable of restarting services. If you still try doing that using net stop <service> & net start <service>, you will end up unintentionally halting services dependent on service.

Hussfelt Netware's XNET.EXE solves all of this.

New functionality in XNET

• xnet service
  Lists all existing services on the machine.
• xnet service service
  Shows detailed information about a specific service.
• xnet service service startmode
  Sets the startup mode of a service to manual, auto or disabled.
• xnet restart service
  Restarts a service and all its dependent services.

XNET.EXE installation

Simply copy XNET.EXE to %systemroot%\system32 and run it using XNET from within any command console. Since NET.EXE is protected by Windows File Protection (WFP) in Windows 2000 and later versions, it's hard to completely replace with XNET.EXE. It's recommended to define an alias for net instead and set it to automatically run each time a new command console session is initiated.

The old NET.EXE functionality requires that NET.EXE still exists on the system. XNET requires that .NET Framework is installed and employs WMI for some of its functionality.

Download XNET (7 KB)