Installing apps in Win 2K or XP WITHOUT admin rights.

Does anyone know of a way to give all users rights to install applications without giving them administrator or power user rights either domain wide or locally?

nope...

absolutly Nope!..

why?

LOL wondering y u all give such answer. And sorry also I don't know how.

It is possible to install *some* applications as a normal user, but in most cases you can't really consider it installing. It is more running of programs, and I'm sure most users should be able to run things. The Microsoft Applications will need power-users or admin to install if I'm not mistaken.

Anyways, the list of programs that they can *install* is very limited without higher rights.


Sorry I can't be of much help. Perhaps look into remotely administering the computers, but I don't know the specifics of that. Well, there might not be a way that you're looking for here (judging from the responses), but good luck finding another if that is the case.

-Tim_axe

Hi,

On my company laptop I didn't use to have the local admin - pwd. Then Icould install some programs, but most of them required at least local admin. Some programs that I could install,
didn't work porperly.

My advice is : you can try to install, but there is lots of chance you'll get stuck.
I suspect it's for your business-pc or so, cause if it would be your own pc, you wouldn't ask this question. Good luck.

greetz,

If you want, you can make a user a local admin to install programs locally.
They would still be restricted on the network using groups/security settings and global policies. They won't have admin privledges on your network.

If you do this, I would recommend auditing software so you know what people are installing on their PCs. You can incorporate the audits with their logon scripts.

Otherwise, you could get users installing unauthorized software or even worse, unlicensed or pirated software and place the company in jeopardy. The fines for companies that use such software are much worse than that of an individual.

There is also a run-as feature. You can give users a user id and password for an admin account and have them request that the account is enabled when they need to install something. You could just disable it after that. Most people would not do this though.
I think that is a very bad service to start with and ALWAYS disable that and secondary login.

Like others have said, power users are able to install some things but not all.

Users can nearly always install beta versions of software as these seem to ignore security settings.

Some tools can be developed that use the run as functionality. In this situation you provide a local admin UID and pass to the install script and it installs as that user. I am not expert in this area but I worked with the SAP Net Install app that let me do this. I think Novell allows this and there might be other ways.

Cheers,
-D

It depends on what exactly you want the users to do.

For example if you wanted the user to install apps, so that the admin does not have to go round to each machine then assign / publish the software via a Group Policy. By default you have then given the user the right to install that software onto their machine without having admin. rights. Link the Group Policy to the domain container.

Bear in mind that any OUs can block policy inheritence and this could stop the install, however if you set the policy linked to the domain then set no override to install


Hope this helps

variable

For those apps that don't actually check for Admin rights, normally all that is required is to open up the relevant parts of the registry (usually HKLM\Software and below, and possibly HKCR and below) and the directory structure (C:\, C:\Program Files, %systemroot%). I'm not sure I like the idea of this though ;-)

All of this can be done via GPOs, but if you are using GPOs and want to give the users flexibility you should consider publishing the applications as either MSIs or ZAPs. At least you then have an idea what they can install as you published it.

I thought of this too. I have the same problem on my school's PCs. The teacher is new on the school and she doesn't know the password to install the Counter-Strike (mod of Half-Life). I thought to write on a CD the files of the game and make a copy-paste to put them on the PCs of my school. But i didn't worked properly, there were missing data drom Registry. Then i thought of backuping the keys from my registry and copying them to the PCs, but i don't know the way to backup the keys.

After my failure i searched on Google and found a programme called sth like l0pht... but i had to register, it didn't offer a trial, so i left the idea of LAN counter-strike on school aside.

Try to search on the Google for this prog.