I just installed Remote Server Administrative Tools (RSAT) on windows 7, and turned features on as mentioned in the installation guide. Now the Administrative Tools have been installed and successfully listed in the All Programs list of start menu.
I want to set up a local network. I want to create users/passwords, and give them access to shared drives with permissions, etc.
My questions is:
How do I configure the Active Directory in windows 7 for the first time?
RSAT is to remotely manage an Active Directory environment. It's not for creating an AD environment.
If you want to create an AD environment, you need Windows Server (2003/2008/2012) and install the 'Active Directory Domain Services' or 'Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services' role. There are instructions online on how to do that.
Related
When I use an Inno Setup installer in Windows 10, I can't select files from a network drive. For example, in the following picture, I can't access the S: drive and browse its content:
Thank you very much for your help.
Indeed, this problem seems related to the User Account Control (UAC) as explained in this post : Windows 10 and network drive.
Thanks to #StayOnTarget for the answer.
Inno Setup FAQ includes topic
Mapped drives aren't showing up on the Select Destination Location wizard page, or cannot be browsed into:
Your installation requires administrative privileges and is running elevated:
Mapped drives are not available (by default) to any elevated application. This was introduced in Windows Vista.
There is an option to make them available for same user elevation, but this won't help the situation when run from a LUA where the user changes.
Also, see Windows 10 and network drive
We are writing an installer for our Windows tool. As our tool uses an updater (wyUpdate) and we want that users WITHOUT Administator rights can performs updates. Which is the right directory to install the app to? The standard C:\Program Files requires Administrator rights, so we have discarded this option. After reading a bit on the Web, we have chosen AppData, i.e. C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local.
Is this best practice? Or should we use another directory?
If you do not want to allow your users to mess with the installed program, you have to install it to a folder that needs Administrator privileges.
To allow an automatic update of such application, you need to develop/install a service that runs with Administrator privileges, which will update the installation. This is what Windows Update, Mozilla Maintenance Service, Google Chrome Elevation Service, Adobe Acrobat Update Service and similar services do.
If you do not want to implement a service, but you want the application to be used by all users of the machine, you need to install it to a folder that can be accessed by all users, yet does not need Administrator privileges. You can for example use C:\Users\Public. See also Is there a shared folder in Windows to which non-elevated users have write access?. You can use PUBLIC environment variable to resolve that path.
If the application is to be used by one user only, then you are ok with using C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local – {userappdata} in Inno Setup.
Related question: Deploying application with .NET framework without admin privileges
I'm getting requests from 'the Field' to make my agent deployment 'easier' but I'm at a loss as to how.
Right now, I provide a user Interface to install and configure the agents.
To deploy the agents, I relied on older Windows technologies, here are the steps I use:
Start dependent services via remote SCM
Copy the agent.MSI via the File Administrative shares
Configure the agent's settings via remote registry calls
Use WMI to remotely silently run the agent.msi
Use the Administrative shares to move the agent.msi to the program folder (for uninstalling later)
To allow all these steps to happen, I need:
1. the firewall to configured correctly
2. the 'installing' user has to have admin access to the remote computer
3. Remote File Admin shares have to be turned on.
4. (I turn on WMI and Remote Registry remotely)
This deployment system was built back in the 2003 days.
Is there some better way now? Maybe a deployment library I can use?
thank you.
The best you can do here is to create a properly behaving .MSI that supports silent installation. It is then up to your user communities to plan their own deployments using the tools of their choice such as SCCM. Much more detail is required in order to give exact suggestions.
I have successfully captured an image using sysprep and can provision new machines from it, however all the custom user settings are missing (desktop shortcuts, chrome bookmarks etc...).
A more serious issue is that one of the applications I had installed fails on the provisioned machine unless run as administrator (due to the way it writes some files when being installed originally).
How can I ensure this profile information is preserved and I don't hit the permissions issue for the application?
I have been pointed at the following link (http://theitbros.com/sysprep-xp-sp3-copy-administrator-profile/) but it seems to be Win XP specific.
Profile information can be migrated to a new deployment using the User State Migration Tool (USMT). USMT is a free tool designed to help IT Professionals migrate files and settings to Windows 7 or Windows 8. USMT captures user accounts, user files, operating system settings, and applications settings and then migrates them to the new Windows installation. The TechNet articles ‘Step-by-Step: Basic Windows Migration using USMT for IT Professionals’ and ‘User State Migration Tool 4.0 User’s Guide’ are good places to start learning how to use USMT.
For your application issue, I would recommend using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) for your deployments. MDT can deploy your image and then install device drivers and applications to the machine automatically. These two video walkthroughs are specific to migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 with MDT, and using USMT to migrate the user files and settings:
Part 1: Building the Deployment Environment
Part 2: Initiating the Install and Migrating the PC
There is also a Microsoft Virtual Academy 7 part course titled ‘Migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7’ that has two parts dedicated to using USMT to transfer user data and one part for MDT.
MDT can be downloaded here, and USMT is a part of the ADK which is a component of MDT.
Hope this helps,
The answer here wasn't very elegant (in my mind at least) but here is what I did to achieve the desired result:
Create the VM as usual (specifying the admin user during setup)
Create a new (non-admin) user and give them RDP access
Log in as the non-admin user
Install all the necessary software
Log in as the admin user, change the permissions for any files that were causing an issue to be readable by the non-admin user
Run sysprep as the admin and complete the process as detailed elsewhere
This gave me an image that I was able to provision VMs from. When creating the VM I specified the admin user to be created (but then never needed to login as the admin, as I would just login as my non-admin user that was created before). All profile settings for the non-admin user are preserved.
Hope this helps anyone else facing the same issue.
Is there a LDAP server emulator or a Windows Active Directory emulator, I'm talking something in the lines of smtp4dev which doesn't have to be configured and just work for a development environment in order to test authentication code.
I suspect you might want to try Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS), formerly known as Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM).