Hiya folks.
As we all know, running legacy applications on windows 2000 is an absolute pain in the ass. I mean, if you dont have a problem giving people local ADMIN access, no problem right? Wrong. We went to windows 2000 to stop people from installing AOL (and a host of other crap) and we’re not about to give people administrative access to the computers. We’ve spent to much money and man hours on support called because people were able to futz with their computers (win98).
Fine. But now the issue of running these legacy programs (hell, how about the latest version of dragon dictate? they REQUIRE the user have administrative access to their computers. and thats not even a legacy program!!! crappy software….) on windows 2000is beginning to really harrass us.
I know about runas.exe and started researching su.exe. What i really wanted to do is this.
Create a LOCAL admin on the computer (named runner). Then take a .bat file and have the .bat file run
“runas.exe /user:runner c:\folder\legacy.exe”
Obviously you dont want a .bat file to have a local administrator password embedded in it. I had planned to hand that .bat file over to our VB programmer and have him make it into an .exe (so people cannot see the PASSWORD). (hell, i was even going to just rename the .bat to a .exe, change the icon, and boom. No-one would know the difference) But the problem is, runas.exe (and as far as I know su.exe) will NOT allow you to imbed the password in the command line. DOH.
If I can pull this off somehow, this information would come in VERY VERY handy to every win2k admin i KNOW. But I’m stuck at this point.
Any ideas?
Thanks!
-Ginel Lipan
public@lipan.org
MIS Dept.