In tonight’s post I provide a background story about UAC and Pre-Vista/2008 Ready Applications. In my next post, I will then go over the technical reasons for why UAC and Pre-Vista/2008 Ready Applications interact the way they do. Enjoy…
UAC has always been a pain in the butt for me. However, un-like most people the source of my pain is a little different. Thus, rather than griping about everyone’s favorite UAC pop-up, I get annoyed when dealing with Pre-Vista/2008 Ready Applications.
***cough*** ipconfig **** anyone!
Well, most recently, my nemesis the Pre-Vista/2008 application appeared in the most unlikely of places: the Exchange Server 2007 installer. For some odd reason when attempting to install Exchange Server 2008 SP1 (management tools only) on a Windows Server 2008 machine. The installer would almost immediately crap out with an access denied message (or was it something to the effect “elevation required”). Anyhow, considering that I was logged on using an account that had the correct rights to complete the installation, the error message didn’t make sense. Furthermore, I’ve installed Exchange Server 2007 on a Windows Server 2008 machine before without experiencing an error like this.
Considering that I didn’t have any ExchangeSetupLogs at that point (a possible indication of the problem) I asked the holy oracle Google about the error. While perusing about search results I noticed several threads that had vague references to UAC. That’s when it hit me that the Exchange installer doesn’t invoke UAC like it should. Hmmmmmm…
So… I executed Setup.com using the Windows Explorer “Run as administrator” option and attempted to reinstall the Exchange Server 2007 management tools. Bingo, the installation went through fine. Again, I will go over the technical details in my next post for why this occurred. But, as a general rule, you should always ensure application installers are “elevated” to ensure a clean installation.
Case in point, I noticed this today on the update ILM2 Beta 3 documentation:
“You must run ilm-server-64bit.msi with elevated rights. If UAC is enabled, installing the ILM “2” server components without elevated rights will cause the installation to fail.”
