LUA for Windows XP?

One of the more interesting features of Windows Vista is that it limits control of an administrative account so that you have to provide credentials or confirm an action that requires administrative privileges. If you are not a local administrator then you have to provide a username and password that will allow you to perform the action.

 

Schley Andrew Kutz who works for one of my clients has written a similar tool that will function on Windows XP. This tool was meant to be a SUDO tool like on Unix. The tool is called SUDO for Windows. The key thing about this tool is that it allows you to run as a “User” and elevate to an administrator without changing the profile context. This gets around many of the drawbacks of “Runas.” When you do a “runas” you actually change to the profile of the user you are running as so if you were to save a file to the My Documents folder while doing a runas it would save it the folder of the account that you are “running as” and not the originating user. This can often be confusing to users and administrators.

 

Check out this tool. Andrew is a software altruist so the tool is completely free. Perhaps some enterprising person will take this idea and run with it and bring it to market. Andrew just wants credit for it.

 

You can read more about this and download SUDO for Windows here: https://sudowin.sourceforge.net/