Turns out local administrators cannot elevate their privileges over the network, with UAC enabled.

Note that this doesn’t affect users in the Domain Admins group!

Now, you could do the dumb “neowin poweruser” thing and turn UAC off, or you could change this particular behavior in the registry. Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

And add a new DWORD named LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy with a value of 1, and then reboot. It all should work.

Again, users with Domain Admin privileges are unaffected.

You can find the new version here.

This time they are available for both Python 2.4 and 2.5. Enjoy.

Getting the whole thing to compile was not exactly a walk in the park, so I assumed people would be glad to have an easy Binary installer handy. I plan to use this library for a few internal projects, and I want the said project to be as multi platform as possible.

So far, they are only packaged for Python 2.5 but I will try to package them for 2.4 later on today or during this week.

See the details here.

They were built on Windows Server 2003 with MSVC from Visual C++ 2005 Express.

I hope this helps.

for /F "usebackq tokens=2,*" %i in (`net use | find "..."`)... 
| was unexpected

I really wanted to like writing cmd scripts. But the parser is way too obnoxious when parsing brackets. For instance, you can’t set an environement variable in one branch of a conditional statement.

if "text" EQU "othertext" ( 
    set VAR=value 
) else ( 
    echo Not Working. 
)

This will fail silently or with unexpected results. Can’t wait until PowerShell becomes mainstream enough for me to use.

This is nifty. Not something to scream about while tearing your clothes off in a moment of raw ardency, but still, I find it relatively useful.

You perhaps already know how Windows Debugging Tools such as WinDbg can output to a serial or network console, but I found out this concept can be extended to basically any console application that doesn’t really mess around with the terminal. See it as a mix between netcat and screen.

You just need “remote.exe” that comes with the Windows Debugging Tools. I personally use it to launch Macromedia JRun4 in a console on a development server at one of my client sites to debug their web application remotely. That way I can see the log in my local console instead of toggling between the server and Terminal Services. Read on for an overview of how it works.

Syntax

It’s fairly easy to grasp, if you keep in mind that parameters must be passed in a specific order.

A real-life, live example would be the following:

remote.exe /S "jrun.exe start devserver" jrun-console /U admin /U gauthiera

/S specifies the command to run, followed by the session name. In this particular case, it will run “jrun.exe start devserver” and name the session “jrun-console”.

/U will specify which users are able to access the session. I heard it doesn’t work unless you’re part of a Domain. I have yet to verify this. You can repeat the parameter as many times as necessary. Ensure, however, that the user running remote.exe is in there. Hence, in my example “admin” and “gauthiera” being the user who ran the command on the server and the client that is allowed to connect, respectively.

Client

On the client side, issuing

remote.exe /C devserver jrun-console

will connect to the listening server. I just issued the server name, followed by the session name.

You can also make sessions visibles or invisible, query them, and all sorts of other things. More details can be found in the application help. Just issue remote.exe /?, as usual.

It just comes in handy, sometimes.

To run the Active Directory Users and Computers with Administrator rights, you can use some runas.exe magic. Just create a shortcut to the following target:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\runas.exe /USER:DOMAIN\adminuser "mmc dsa.msc"

Of course, just change DOMAIN\adminuser to whatever applies.

It works fine for my purposes. The trick is just knowing the name of that particular mmc snap-in. That’s pretty basic knowledge, but I’ve been asked three times this week about it.

PowerShell is actually the only new technology coming from Microsoft that has gotten me excited. I have played around with the Betas and Release Candidates at work, now I can finally USE it. It will take some time before it reaches the production environnement, but this will make my life substantially more pleasant when working with windows.

The stock photo used in there appears to be an Apple iBook.

Mild amusement on my part.

Update: Here is the link to a screenshot of the full page.

svn: Can’t recode string

Well, this was a matter of changing the encoding used by my system locale to match the one of the repository, which was done by editing the file .profile in my home directory (I use bash as a default shell, which is the default on OS X 10.3 and above, as opposed to csh) and added the following:

export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

This basically had the effect of setting up the locale to UTF8, which swallowed the file without problems. I just though I’d post it there because it was useful — I didn’t really google around to check out if that solution was already out there, but I will mirror it on underwares.org anyways.

Hope this helps someone, somehow.

But apart from that, I stick to my true Unix roots and try to do as much as possible with the command prompt — not out of pride, or some other political reasons, but rather because I like command prompts. They indeed make me all mushy inside and moist down the pants for a very sadistic and wrong reason. I just find that I am more efficient with them.

So, I stumbled across a few things that made my daily journey into text input land alot more pleasant, and I will share them with you.

Tweak that cmd.exe

As much as it reminds me of my old DOS days, and as much as I totally loathed the fucker, there are a few things in there that will make this shell a wee bit more potable.

Fire up a command prompt by going to start->run->cmd.exe, and then click on the top left icon. Contextual menu a’ight, if you’re an old fart from windows 3.x you may shed a nostalgy tear — but only one, please. Then, select “Defaults”. Many people don’t even know that cmd.exe is configurable.

Settings

• Increase The Buffer Size to “500″. It is usually set to 50 which is everything but useful.
• Check Discard Old Duplicates
• Check QuickEdit Mode, Insert Mode and AutoComplete.

QuickEdit mode: This will allow you to select text with the mouse, hit enter and then paste it away. A must if you miss the copy-on-select- behaviour of unix shells.
Insert Mode: This should be on. If it isn’t you must love overtyping stuff past the cursor.
AutoComplete: More on this later. You know you want it, tab-completion right off the bat.

Screen Real Estate

I’m sure you’d like to have some more real-estate when piping these commands.

• Switch the fond to Lucida Console. It is a bit more tiny.
• Set screen buffer height to 999
• Set Window Height to something higher, I suggest 40 or 50, tweak to your liking.
• Change the colors. Take note that you can change the colors of the shell. I have a neat gray-ish setup I find easy on eyes.

Tips and Tricks

Now, let’s explore what we can do with cmd.exe.

Tab Completion

Ah yes, a true feature the modern unix veteran cannot live without. While you cannot work out multiple regex into dir, you can actually use wildcards in tab completion.

For those who have no clue how tab completion works at all, it involves hitting tab to autocomplete the filename or command you’re trying to type from a list of possible choices.

So here’s an example:

C:\temp\exmp>dir
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 383C-9102

 Directory of C:\temp\exmp

 2005-09-19  12:52    <dir> .
 2005-09-19  12:52    <dir> ..
 2005-09-19  12:51    5 ExcruciatIngly_hard_to_tyPe_FileNa-me.txt
                1 File(s)              5 bytes
                2 Dir(s)  18 110 910 464 bytes free

C:\temp\exmp>

As you can see, There’s a long and annoying filename. While windows isn’t as strict as most unices (in the sense that it is not case sensitive) it is still time consuming to type all this out.

So instead of typing the whole filename, I can just issue…

 C:\temp\exmp>del Ex

And press the tab key. The command prompt will autocomplete for me.

 C:\temp\exmp>del ExcruciatIngly_hard_to_tyPe_FileNa-me.txt

In the case of an ambiguous complete, (ex. you have two files both starting by the same letters) you can hit tab multiple times and cmd.exe will rotate possible choices for you. The engine handling this seems to be pretty dumb at times though, and is not very reliable. But it works.

Now where it gets a bit more powerful is if you use wildcards. I have a couple of files in a directory here. (Do not worry about the “ls” part, I have unix utilities installed. More on this in Part II of this article

 H:\Backup>ls
 serveur-pc100.bkf  serveur-pc102.bkf  station-pc101.bkf
 serveur-pc101.bkf  station-pc100.bkf  station-pc102.bkf

Now, suppose I know the backup file i’m trying to copy is related to pc100, but I am not sure which and how it is named. I can issue this:

 H:\Backup>copy *-pc100*

And then tab it out to have it autocomplete to to this:

 H:\Backup>copy serveur-pc100.bkf

If it is not what I wanted, I can press tab again to have it become:

 H:\Backup>copy station-pc100.bkf

Cool huh? It will only rotate between choices that match the poor man’s regex you just entered. I use this alot more than I should.

History

As you probably already know, you can get to the last few commands you typed by pressing the “up” key. Well, it turns out you can also view and select stuff from your history using the F7 key, which will bring the following dialog up

Neat huh?

push and pop, baby

They do have unix equivalent, and they are so underused…

The command pushd allows you to change to a directory while keeping the one you were in previously in memory. Once you’re done farting around with that directory of yours, you can invoke popd to automagically return to wherever you were before you pushd‘d.

An example

 C:\WINDOWS>pushd "c:\Documents and Settings"

 C:\Documents and Settings>dir
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 383C-9102

 Directory of C:\Documents and Settings

 2005-09-01  10:54    <dir> .
 2005-09-01  10:54    <dir> ..
 2005-08-25  12:43    <dir> Admin
 2005-06-01  18:03    <dir> Administrator
 2005-09-15  12:49    <dir> All Users
 2005-09-01  11:30    <dir> Tech1
 2005-09-19  09:16    <dir> Tech3
                0 File(s)              0 bytes
                7 Dir(s)  18 110 914 560 bytes free

C:\Documents and Settings>popd

C:\WINDOWS>

See, simple and sweet. I use this alot under unix when I am switching between editing the Apache configuration and editing a file in a virtual host root folder.

That’s all for today. In the next installment of this guide, we will discuss the following:

• Running a bash compatible shell on windows
• Emulating a unix shell
• MSH (Microsoft Command Shell), currently codenamed Monad.

Feel free to comment if you found this useful.