[Metacard] Re: Win XP: a new dawn

[Phil Davis]

Have you looked at Fred Langa's stuff? (http://www.langa.com/) From
there you may find links to groups discussing XP security and the like.

HTH.
Phil

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Cragg" <dcragg at lacscentre.co.uk>
To: <metacard at www.runrev.com>
Sent: Friday, November 23, 2001 2:10 AM
Subject: Win XP: a new dawn


> Hi all
>
> Be warned!  The new dawn is what you'll see after working all night
> to see if your old apps still run on XP. :)
>
> First, Metacard seems to run fine. I've had no "engine trouble" so
> far. But XP's new security enforcement may catch you out. (It caught
> me out.)
>
> Two main problems so far: running an installer and writing files to
> places you shouldn't.
>
> But there's an extra twist. If you install XP over a previous OS (NT
> for exmple) it retains the basic security setup of the old OS. This
> is what I did at first, and everything seemed to run as before. I
> told my client that it performs fine under XP (we'd had a report of a
> user not being able to run the app with XP), and he went away happy.
>
> A day later, I re-installed XP following some hardware problems. This
> time I made a clean install. I tried to run the client's app again,
> and things were different. After starting the installer ( older
> version of Wise), I was greeted with a very pretty system message
> that an Administrator password should be used to install applications
> (I was logged in as a plain user). But it gave the option to install
> under the current user account. I tried with the user account, and
> the installer failed with an error about access restrictions. I'm
> guessing it was when writing to the registry.
>
> I installed again, this time giving an Administrator password, and it
> installed fine. But when I ran the installed app from the user
> account, I immediately hit problems. The app writes a file locally in
> the same directory where the standalone is. This is mainly
> configuration data, and I think a number of users on the list use
> this technique. Anyway, this was a no-no. No writing to the Program
> Files directory for plain users.
>
> However, I found that by copying the complete directory that contains
> the standalone and other stacks out of the Program Files directory,
> it would run fine.
>
> I'm now trying to work out what you can and can't do, and also find a
> better strategy for running and deploying the application. But I
> can't find any clear documentation on this, only a number of
> references to thing being different depending on environment: XP
> Home, XP Pro, installed on a workgroup network, installed on a
> domain, etc. So far, it looks like security through obscurity to me,
> but I guess there's a method to it. If someone knows a good reference
> for this, could you let us know.
>
>
> Cheers
>
> Dave Cragg
>
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>



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