We recommend that when you run the Backburner Manager and Server as services you do that using a specific user account as opposed to running it under the Local System Account. You can change that on the Log On tab when you edit the properties for the service.

By running it as a specific user you also get the benefit that if you'd like to edit the settings you can:

• remove the service: serversvc.exe -r
• log in as the user you run the service as
• run server.exe and use the UI to change the required settings
• install the service again: serversvc.exe -i
• edit the service settings to make sure the service runs under the user account you've created for it

The benefit being that the settings that are written to the backburner.xml file are validated by the UI and therefore correct.

You can of course edit the xml file manually, but you have to make sure you don't make mistakes.

One approach would be to:

• create a copy of the backburner.xml file
• run server.exe on a machine and make the required changes
• check the changes that were made in the file
• replicate those changes to the backburner.xml file on the target machine(s)
• restart the services

Copying across the backburner.xml files from one machine to another won't work without a bit of editing, otherwise all your servers will have the same id and only a single one will be running (i posted about that last year: at_any_given_time_only_one_of_your_backburner_servers_can_connect_to_the_backburner_manager).

Normally you can find the backburner.xml under: C:UsersUSER_NAMEAppDataLocalbackburner (where USER_NAME is the user name of the user you run the service as). 

If you run the service under the Local System Account the file goes to C:WindowsSysWOW64configsystemprofileAppDataLocalbackburner , that may not be immediately obvious.