Gaining Administrator Level Access

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I am not a Windows programmer, but I can find my way around the API when necessary.

I have a client who wants to kickoff a process that installs a small piece of software on a user’s local Win NT workstation. The users do not have access to the Administrator account (which is required to install new sottware), so I want to know if the process could gain Administrator access if it was given the Administrator account and password for the local machine. If the process needs to restart the OS that’s acceptable, but not optimal. I do want to make sure that the user would not have access to the login information.

Is any of this possible or feasible?

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I don’t know about NT4, I haven’t used it in years, but with 2k or XP there is the command “runas”. This lets a process run under a user account other than the logged on user. Probably not what you are looking for, but maybe it will lead to something helpful.

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The security model in the NT platform is designed to prevent just this sort of thing, so I don’t think a workaround is going to be found. I don’t want to sound sanctimonious but presumably the machine’s administrator doesn’t want software installed without their knowledge.

If it’s a case of a lost admin password, you can turn to l0pht, which is prohibitively expensive for what you want to accomplish, or a reinstall of Windows.

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I think I can avoid sanctimoy. It is the Machine Administrators who are my client and who are the ones who are giving me the Admin Password. They just want a more seamless way of installing this new software that they have.

It has been suggested that the SA.EXE tool that comes with the Resource Kit will do the trick and some quick investigation on my part appears to bear this out.

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If the tool from the Resource kit works, go for it. The other two options are to use the RunAs (It may accept command line arguments, never bothered to check), or the more pain in the @55 method is to create and use a security token within your programming. Complete pain, and I personally have never completely finished the process of doing such, I have only used portions of it for various tasks.

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