JATB - Just Another Tech Blog

17 Jun, 2006

A fellow over in Hungary emailed me the other day. He liked my WinSUDO tool and decided to rewrite it properly. I suggest everyone (anyone?) who uses my WinSUDO tool uninstall WinSUDO and use this new program instead.

http://sudown.mine.nu/

5 Apr, 2006

Apple just annouced that they would support the booting of Windows on their new Intel based PCs. In an interview, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing Philip Schiller, said (emphasis added by me) this:

"Apple has no desire or plan to sell or support Windows, but many customers have expressed their interest to run Windows on Apple's superior hardware, now that we use Intel processors..."

Story here.

21 Jan, 2006

I've created a page for my litle program, WinSUDO. It has information and links to downloads. FYI, there is a new version available that fixes several bugs and adds support for special .lnk files that a created by msi installers. The page can be found here...

http://winsudo.toadlife.net

19 Jan, 2006

Edit on 2006-01-20 - I forgot to mention that this little utility was inspired by Aaron Margosis' makemeadmin utility. You can visit Aaron's excellent blog here.

For my first ever (and possibly last) blog entry, let me introduce my newest creation, "WinSUDO". This is a little Windows service that allows regular users to run applications as if they were administrators. Very handy for those of us who practice least privilege on our Windows boxes.

It comprises of just four files....

* wsudosvc.cmd - Script that handles SUDO requests by users
* wsudosvc.exe - Windows service wrapper (obtained from this site) that allows the above to script to run as a windows service
* wsudoclt.cmd - Client script that users use to request use of the SUDO service
* wsudosl.exe - "sleep.exe" from the Windows 2003 resource kit. This is here because there is not wait/sleep command in the DOS batch language.

The service can only be used by Power users (by default) and members of a group called "sudoers", which is automatically created by the sudo service when it starts for the first time.

As of now, it supports running four types of files...
* .exe files (duh!)
* .cpl (Control Panel) files - unfortunately, for this, you have to click directly on the .cpl files
* .msc (THINK:"Administrative Tools") files
* .msi files (Microsoft Installer) - Install, Repair, and Remove are supported

A brief overview of how it works:

* User right clicks on file and selects "sudo" from menu
* sudo client launches, and checks for a lock file. if there is none, it creates one in the work directory
* sudo client sends name of program and user name to text files in the work directory
* sudo service picks up the user name and program name from text files in the work directory
* sudo service adds user to administrators group
* sudo service creates a file name 'cleared' in the work directory
* sudo client detects cleared file and runs program using "runas" command
* sudo client creates a file named "unlock" in the work directory
* sudo service removes user from the administrator group and clears all of the work files
* sudo service logs relevant activity to log file which only administrators can modify

There are still a few more features I would like to add (no log file management), and there very well might be major bugs, but as of now it seems to work very well. Try it out and let me know what you think. You can download it here...

<obsolete link removed>

In case, you are wondering - when/if you uninstall it, it will remove everything except for the directory %systemroot%system32sudo and the "sudoers" group.