Friday, May 19, 2006

The Downside of Non-Admin Privs

I’ve been having various pains getting my new-to-me tablet configured (James sold me his well-used one for $8,799.  What a guy!).  Some of the pains are due to my attempts to get everything set up via installs using the MakeMeAdmin.cmd file to temporarily give myself admin privs.  Per Margosis’s suggestion in that same blog post, I also changed the default install behavior so that new objects belong to the Administrator, not the user doing the install.

All this is generally shiny, but it bit me with my Palm software’s synch stuff.  Attempts to HotSync were haging during the Media phase, and I wasn’t sure what the problem was.  Sysinternals to the rescue.  A quick capture session using Regmon and Filemon pointed me to the culprit: file privilege problems.

The profiles for HotSync don’t get installed in a user’s home directory, rather they’re separate folders in the \Program Files\PalmOne tree.  I can’t write there as a basic user who doesn’t own the installed objects.  Bad implementation on Palm’s part.  Quickly fixed by giving myself modify rights to the profile tree.

Life with non-admin privs takes a little getting used to, but it’s worth the curve.

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