Thoughts and Questions, that come and go...

Tuesday June 24, 2008

Are you sure you want to...? - Windows Vista and 2008

If you have been playing with either Windows Vista or 2008, you are probably familiar with the prompts asking your permission to do various tasks. Now there are a couple of different ways to address the issue and, as I found out recently, some are better than others.

The easiest way to put an end to the prompts and have programs, such as Glassfish, installed and ran as a user different than Administrator on Windows Vista or 2008, is to turn off UAC - User Account Control. It can be accomplished as follows:

1. Open "Control Panel"


2. Go to "User Accounts"


3. Select off for "Turn User Account Control"

You may be tempted to do the following instead:

1. Select Administrator tools > Local Security Policy


2. Select Local policies > Security options


3. Select "User account control behaviour of the elevation prompt for administrator in admin approval mode"


4. Change its settings from "Prompt for consent" to "Elevate without prompting"

With the above change alone, the system will not prompt for consent nor credentials any more, but things will not work as expected either. If you install Glassfish V2 as a user that's part of the Administrators group, you will not be able to start the server due to "Access denied" errors:

$ pwd
C:/Sun/AppServer/domains/domain1
$ cd ../..
$ ./bin/asadmin start-domain
Starting Domain domain1, please wait.
Log redirected to C:\\Sun\\AppServer\\domains\\domain1\\logs\\server.log.
Jun 9, 2008 3:05:18 PM com.sun.enterprise.update.util.LoggerUtil log
SEVERE: C:\\Sun\\AppServer\\updatecenter\\config\\config.xml (Access is denied)
java.io.FileNotFoundException: C:\\Sun\\AppServer\\updatecenter\\config\\config.xml (Access is denied)

That is because Glassfish files will be owned by "Administrators" and the current user will have no write permissions to them. You can still remedy the situation by turning UAC off, as described above. If disabling UAC is not desired on your system, read more about UAC and its various settings on wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control or directly on Microsoft's web site.

Hope this saves someone some time...

Cheers
Lidia