"Access is denied." when running as LocalSystem

[TapeWerm]

• Your Windows build number: (Type ver at a Windows Command Prompt)
  Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.18363.535]

• What you're doing and what's happening: (Copy&paste the full set of specific command-line steps necessary to reproduce the behavior, and their output. Include screen shots if that helps demonstrate the problem.)
  I was trying to use WinSW to make a Windows service for a Bash script and got "Access is Denied." Then I tried to make a Windows service calling bash.exe -c script.sh in Visual Studio and the script did not run. Then I opened a shell as LocalSystem and yet again got the error "Access is Denied." To open a shell as LocalSystem, do the following:

Download Sysinternals PsExec64.exe

.\PsExec64.exe -i -s cmd.exe
bash.exe
wsl.exe

Access is denied. 🎊

• What's wrong / what should be happening instead:
  I assume it's supposed to prompt you to setup WSL as LocalSystem. I know my personal user's rootfs is in my %appdata%, so I assume LocalSystem would have to go through the setup. Perhaps LocalSystem needs a distro from the Microsoft Store. Maybe WSL is not meant to be used like this. To be fair, I am not sure what the intended behavior is.

• Strace of the failing command, if applicable: (If some_command is failing, then run strace -o some_command.strace -f some_command some_args, and link the contents of some_command.strace in a gist here).

• For WSL launch issues, please collect detailed logs.

[TapeWerm]

logs.zip

[valeriob]

Hi,
i'm having the same issue, running as local system account results in access denied. Did you find any solution ?

[TapeWerm]

I never found any solution.

[valeriob]

I'm trying with LOCAL SERVICE but i get the error "W i n d o w s S u b s y s t e m f o r L i n u x h a s n o i n s t a l l e d d i s t r i b u t i o n s . " instead, i guess that wsl is installed for a single users.

[valp124]

Same exact issue, which prevents me from using bash in Azure DevOps pipelines. How can there be no response to this whatsoever in all this time??

[valp124]

I found a workaround, by the way, for anyone interested. After much tinkering, I managed to take ownership of C:\Windows\System32\bash.exe and that allowed me to rename it (I didn't want to delete). After that, I created a symbolic link:

mklink bash.exe "c:\Program Files\Git\bin\bash.exe"

It's a poor man's bash, but at least it works, I tested it with psexec and through the Azure pipeline.

[luckerby]

@valp124 I'm running into the same exact problem, particularly since I need the Azure DevOps self-hosted agent to run as LOCAL SYSTEM.

However I still get "Access denied" running as LOCAL SYSTEM (via psexec -s -i cmd.exe) even after moving bash.exe and creating the symlink. Is there some additional step to be done?

[valp124]

@luckerby, when you test via psexec, are you running the command as admin? Be sure to run whatever shell you're using "As Administrator." Other than that, I wouldn't know what to say, it still works for me. (You'd think that a Windows update would break it at some point.)

[valp124]

You can see below that the linked bash works, but the original bash and wsl don't.

However: