Education and Technology

In our district the school technology support professionals have a limited account and an administrative account in the Active Directory. While most of the time I can administer my campus and users from the limited account, there are times when I need to access the administrative account for just one thing. An example of this is looking up a staff or student ID for a program they need access to.

In this case the steps for this simple thing are:

1. logging off
2. logging into the admin account
3. running the program to look up the ID
4. doing the look up
5. logging off
6. logging back into the limited account
7. adding the user into whatever I need to

Now, that is way too much to do for something so simple. So, my solution is to use “runas” in a batch file to run the program I need as the admin account. This saves all the wasted steps, while letting me be secure in my limited account. Security, plus ease and working smarter is what it’s all about.

So, what does the batch file look like? Here it is:

runas /user:adminusername@domainname “C:\Directory path\Filename [any commands to send to the program]“

Okay, now here is a visual example:

runas /user:edutechation@edutechation.com “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore http://mysite/admin”

The batch file will open a command window to ask you to input the admin password and if the password is correct it will launch Internet Explorer to the web site mysite/admin as the admin account with admin privileges. When you exit IE it drops the admin privileges so the next time you open IE it will be as the limited user account you are logged in as.

The time this saves me is invaluable. Try it, you’ll like it. If you would like to read about the runas command at Microsoft click here

Technorati Tags: RUNAS, Network Administration, Educational Technology

What are we telling our children when we want less honesty, less scrutiny, less forthright politicians? Are we telling them it’s okay to cheat a little bit, we don’t need to know everything? This is a small quote from a CNN article:

Obama’s vetting could chase away candidates – CNN.com

…some political observers say the president-elect’s similar caution with respect to recruiting new administration officials and key high-level advisers may be turning away a string of qualified candidates wary of subjecting themselves and their families to the most rigid presidential vetting process on record.

So, what does this say about these people? Why should we care about people that don’t want to go through a rigorous process? If they have nothing to hide then they shouldn’t care. This is the type of change that we need in Washington. This is the type of change that will bring the trust back to the White House.

Technorati tags: Obama, President