On a Surface Pro 3 with Win8.1, already have VirtualBox 5.0.6 installed (works fine with Linux images), just installed Genymotion 2.5.4.
Every time I try to start Genymotion, it asks for admin privileges to invoke something on VirtualBox. Why does this need admin? Any way to avoid this?
According to Unable to create Genymotion Virtual Device a number of people think it shouldn't and I can't find any reference on Genymotion's website that they need admin.
The admin privilege appears when Genymotion creates or configure network interfaces though VirtualBox. This network configuration is unfortunately mandatory for the software to work correctly.
The last changes on Windows and VBox obliges us to do it more frequently so that's the reason why you see it each time you start the program.
I encountered this problem with my non privileged user accounts using Windows 10. When Genymotion runs for the first time as the current user, it will create a virtual interface if it does not see one defined in the users profile. If your account has Administrator privileges, it will create the interface without issue. As a non privileged user, you will get prompted for admin credentials so that a new virtual interface can be created and defined.
My workaround was to run Genymotion with an account that has administrator privileges so that the virtual interface is defined and the Genymotion interface starts up. After that, I preserve the following directories in:
C:\Users\%USERNAME%.VirtualBox and
C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore
When I have a new user that needs to run Genymotion, I have them run a script that restores these directories to their profile. They can then run Genymotion without needing Admin credentials.
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We are building system controlled by computer running windows 10 ltsc 2021. It is kind of a kiosk system. There is an account, lets call it user1 with local admin rights that will autologon with no password. It also requires quite a few user account customizations.
In the previous version of windows 10 ltsc, i used a baseline windows installation, created the account to be used in kiosk mode and performed all customizations. I used sysprep with unattended file that had CopyProfile set to TRUE, then boot WinPE and use dism to capture image for distribution to new systems.
It worked well until the file associations were reset after imaging, I could work around this issue by deleting certain registry elements before running sysprep (it could be also done offline on captured image).
Then we started building systems based on win 10 ltsc 2021. Immediately started to have different issue. After applying image, all items in Windows security area were not clickable. I could not click for example on Virus and threat protection to setup some virus scans. Recreating user account would fix that (have to create secondary account, delete user1 and create new user1). However the recreated user account would not have all customizations we need.
I started experimenting with CopyProfile set to false. I go to audit mode right before creating user in original windows installation. I install updates, some extra apps we need and also make some non user account specific customizations. The idea is to create final kiosk user account by unattended file passed to sysprep. And here is where I have number of challenges. I create user account user1 in oobeSystem pass. I setup autologon. So far this will work. On first boot it will autologon and go thru the whole first user creation experience. What I need it to do is to have customized user account settings.
Is there a way to provide that via some unattended process? I also need to run one time powershell script on first boot, that performs additional system setups and customizations. Quick test to create FirstLogonCommand in oobeSystem with that should create new folder and simple text file shows that it fails to run. Maybe it runs the command before the user account/session is fully functional, I do not know. The goal is to be able to run specialized powershell script once in context of the user1 account.
Any thoughts?
There's currently a bug with sysprep and Windows 10 LTSC 2021.
After running sysprep, Windows security breaks for all existing users at the time sysprep was run. It works correctly for new users, including the one created on the OOEB account screen. Only the UI becomes inaccessible for existing users, while features seem to work correctly.
To fix it, you can run the following command in PowerShell as admin:
Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage
-DisableDevelopmentMode -Register “$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml”}
It might show some errors, but it will work. This resets the security app which will fix the UI not showing.
Unfortunately, I don't know how to stop this from happening in the first place.
I'm trying to figure out how to install software when the PC reboots Note that this is on machine startup, not user login. Anyone have any suggestions? Google searches just return how to set programs to start on user login. That's not what I need.
You have a few puzzle pieces to unravel here:
Choosing a mechanism for running on startup prior to user login. For this, the fact that your task is installation of further software doesn't matter. A "service" is the usual way to do this, although for example antivirus software tends to use device drivers.
Automating scheduling your code to run at startup. If you chose a service in the above step, this means using the Service Control Manager API.
Actually doing the work, without having an active user login session. Services run in an environment where there is no UI available, the user registry is associated with a service account and not any real user, etc. Other than that, code runs normally (you can load DLLs, access files and directories, etc). Permissions needed by your installer may also become a problem and cause you to modify the service installation options in step 2.
Is there a way to create a user in the new Windows 10 implementation of bash so that I'm not running it as root, without having to create a different user account in the Windows 10 system? I want to use Windows as an administrator with my normal user account but when I launch bash I want it to launch into an account other than the default account, which I'm guessing is automatically root (in the Linux subsystem) since it's the administrator account (in the Windows system).
WSL is specially designed not to compromise the normal Windows security, and it is (currently) "client-only". Thus, the "root" inside a WSL session is just simulation to make things look more real for stuff you run in the "Linux" environment. From the Windows point of view, root in WSL is the same user which launched the WSL. If this user is an elevated admin, the WSL programs are too.
For details, see the few available Channel9 videos and WSL blog.
To the original question - how to "drop" admin privileges for running WSL, see for example here.
When you install Bash on Windows the first time, you are prompted to create a (non-root) Linux account. When you start bash.exe, that is the account you are automatically logged in as.
I know this question overlaps with some other StackExchange sites, however since I want a development environment this matches for StackOverflow.
I'm setting up an VM with vagrant to extend a Linux service on a windows host. It works fine so far just softlinks don't work on shared folders. This is a known bug of VirtualBox. There is a workaround if you run virtual box on an account without admin permissions. However this is no option for me. AFIK I can modify the group permissions of a standard user so that they can create a symlink (on NTFS), but this does not work for admin users. So I need to run the VM with a different user account. Any idea how I can setup vagrant to run a VM with a different user?
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.