Monday, September 21, 2009

Vista RunAs

For some reason they didn't add the RunAs option to the context menu for windows Vista. If you are not an administrator on the computer and you chose the "Run as administrator" option, you will be able to enter administrative credentials, but if you are an administrator it will automatically bypass this and just give you elevated privileges.

This is a real pain in the current environment that I'm working in because they gave us administrative privileges on our local machines but we need to use SA privileges on other machines. In other environments this wouldn't be a concern because with remote desktop you could log in as any user you want...the issue in this environment is that everything is SmartCard enabled and I don't even know the password of my SA account: I just have my SmartCard and PIN.

I have found some tools out there to accomplish what I need, but nothing has been as effective as the runas command line.

runas.exe /smartcard mstsc.exe

I set up a shortcut on my start menu with that command. Just remember to run it as administrator.

An update to this, there is a group policy setting called "Always prompt for credentials" that will do this cleaner...But our network guys disabled it for some reason.

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