The Context

I’m working on bringing Octopus Deploy into our company. We have a good number of TopShelf services. Octopus Deploy does not directly support installing Topshelf services so I’m creating the functionality in a Step Template. While attempting to install my service I got the command-line arguments slightly wrong. Instead of deploying a service called MyService I deployed a service called "MyService". The services manager on the target server recognized the service, but neither the Powershell function Get-Services nor sc.exe could find it. I was eventually able to get a reference to the service using Get-WmiObject Win32_Service -Name "MyService". I tried calling the delete method on this service and it did not succeed.

I was stuck. I can’t uninstall the service because none of the built-in tools recognize it.

I had no choice but to kill the server and rebuild it. It’s a good thing that we’re trying to treat servers like cattle and not pets.