Non-Admin

Quickbooks' sloppy security holes

John Watson — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 15:43:00 GMT

It seems from reading other posts, such as Keith Brown's Hall of Shame and Hall of Shame Honorees for Admin Rights, that Quickbooks is a sloppy piece of software when it comes to security rights. However, Susan's post really shows how bad it is - just take a look at all the things you have to open up in her first link for standalone. Her Hall of Shame piece lists various KB articles and Intuit's apparent ambivalence toward the whole issue.

Why am I bringing this up? Because I used BHO Demon and SpywareBlaster recently to make sure things were tightened and all was well for several days UNTIL I happened to run QuickBooks. The “stupid software” has the audacity to tell me that my security settings are too high and I should lower them so that it runs properly. Um...if you take the trouble to put code in your product to detect this condition then why not take the time to actually fix the problem! Requiring lower browser settings, writing to various parts of the registry and to folders under \Program Files has been a well-known “no-no's” for quite some time now.

Glad to see Microsoft is getting in the game with their Small Business Accounting product. After using Quicken since V2.0 in the late '80s and QB since 2000, I'm glad to see Intuit is about to get some serious competition. Nothing like falling sales, layoffs, and taking fat profits out of the pockets of management (they sure don't spend it on improving their products!!) to wake up a sloth!

Running Thunderbird as Non-Admin

John Watson — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 12:28:00 GMT

I found that you can run Thunderbird as a non-admin user without any difficulties. However, installing or updating extensions will only work if you have admin priviledges. Here's another cmd script to run from Aaron Margosis' MakeMeAdmin console window...

Create a cmd script called “thunder.cmd” with one line:

@start "" /b "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe"

Running with a clean machine as non-admin

John Watson — Tue, 03 May 2005 02:26:00 GMT

I've been intrigued with the idea of non-admin since around the time I went to PDC 2003. While I had dabbled around with VMWare it wasn't until I loaded Virtual PC that I took virtual machine technology for a serious tryout. At the time, it gave me a chance to play around with Longhorn but it wasn't long before I realized it could be a big part of a consultant's toolkit.

Before VPC, my average for re-paving a machine was usually 6-12 months. In that timeframe, I would end up adding and configuring software for at least a couple of clients as well as a few different development projects I was working on. Add to that the plethora of utilities and typical desktop software and you can see why it started to look like my home office desktop before long! Let's just say my wife doesn't like to go in there and swears it's impossible for me to find anything. My OS would never seem to hold up long; looking back to Win 3.1, that's a lot of repaving over the last 14 years!

Jason's article on his current setup reminded me of what I set out to do when I recently repaved. I made a point to load only the full Office suite and a bunch of essential utilities and did the following:

Each client “gets“ their own VPC image - separate configuration, versions, tools etc.
One VPC image for our own internal development.
One VPC image for each test/play environment (e.g. VS2005 Beta 2)
My primary logon account for the host machine is non-admin. I make use of Aaron's MakeMeAdmin and PrivBar tools for those utilities and times that require it.
I have resisted installing any development tools into my host machine with the exception of Dreamweaver MX 2004 - which is almost like another “Office“ tool to me.

One caveat - I make my logon account in the development images Admin mostly because it's still too hard not to and be effective. I know there are workarounds but when I'm in “development mode” it has got to be seamless or I become frustrated too quickly. I did, however, manage to last 4 days developing as non-admin about a year and a half ago! Looking forward to, and hoping that VS 2005 can make it truly seemless.