[wpkg-users] Powershell and WPKG

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Tomasz,

Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
 > As long as these command work without user interaction when you start
 > them as a privileged user, such as Administrator or SYSTEM, these
 > commands should also work when started by WPKG.

Right. By default WPKG client executes WPKG with SYSTEM privileges. So 
it is allowed to do basically everything. Of course, if wpkg.js is 
invoked manually only packages which can be executed with the current 
users privileges will success.

By the way - on Windows Vista with active UAC it is pretty hard to 
manually invoke WPKG with elevated privileges. At least I noticed that 
neither running cscript on an elevated CMD shell nor right-clicking a 
*.cmd file (which executes wpkg.js) and run it manually as Administrator 
really helps.

To work around this I wrote a small Script (JScript) which allows you to 
specify by argument what it has to call with elevated rights. So using 
something like

execute-elevated.js myscript.cmd param1 param2

will pop up the usual UAC prompt and then execute myscript.cmd (which 
can execute wpkg.js) with elevated user rights.

I also experimented to implement the code to wrapper.js which would 
actually call itself with elevated rights before invoking wpkg.js. 
Unfortunately I found out that this method erases all custom environment 
variables then. As a result even if wrapper.js would be called by a CMD 
script which sets SOFTWARE and other variables they are not available to 
the finally elevated script.

The only way seems to be to call the batch script itself elevated which 
derives this rights to its childs. So I am currently using something like

execute-elevated.js call-wrapper.cmd

and call-wrapper.cmd sets SOFTWARE and other variables before calling 
'wrapper.js /synchronize' which seems to be really the only way to 
manually invoke WPKG with elevated rights. Without it will simply fail 
to install most of the packages (depending on the packages).

I am going to check in this script to SVN soon (after some additional 
testing).


 > It shouldn't matter if it's PowerShell, Perl, Python etc. (as long as
 > the appropriate interpreter is installed).

Well, the interpreter could be defined as a dependency of the package 
which means that WPKG (1.0+) will install it BEFORE the actual script is 
executed.


br,
Rainer