Okay so I want to make an application that launches other applications. However, the goal here is to make the app "portable" in that I can go from one windows desktop to another while using the same application from a usb drive. So here is a different rundown of what I mean:
I have aplication X. I use it on machine 1 and I want to use it on machine 2. However, machine 2 is my buddy's and he does not want me installing things on it. So, I take all the files that the installer made on my system, and put them into folders. App X put files in the windows folder that it expects when it is launched. If I merely run the the app and it looks in the windows dir it will not find the files. I do not have/want the ability to put files in the windows dir. I want to tell the app to look in folder a for files in folder b instead of where it would normally look. I could then use this program on any machine without having to modify the machine in any way.
Is this doable? If so what is it called so I can look it up?
EDIT: the win dir was an example. I would like the app to be self contained in a folder on the thumb drive. I want to redirect the where the app looks for files to a folder I specify.
This can be done, but how easily depends entirely on the program that you are launching.
The sorts of things that applications will do are:
Just run happily being executed anywhere (no dependencies). These are very easy!
Require some environment variables to be set up. This is easy to do - you can launch a new process with a modified environment if you wish.
Read files from disk. Usually when loading things like .dlls, applications will search on the PATH for the dlls, so they can be copied into the application folder (next to the .exe) and it will run happily on any system. However, in some cases applications will use fixed (or at least, less flexible) paths so that they will be harder to launch successfully.
Read registry settings. This is trickier. You need to know what state is required by the application, have your launcher record the old registry state, change it and run the application, then wait for application exit to restore the original state. This has to be bullet-proof to avoid corruption of the user's registry.
Ultimately you'll need to investigate, for each app you want to launch, just what it needs to run.
If the apps are commercial, then be careful that you are not breaking any licensing (EULA) terms by running them in this way.
Another alternative would be to set up a virtual PC image and simply execute that on the host PC so there is no need to worry about any special cases for each application. Depending on the VPC software you have available you may need to install software on the host PC to allow a virtual PC session to be run though, which may defeat the purpose/intent.
I think the system you describe is U3 (more info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U3). It requires the application to follow the U3 protocol, but if the application does, then it can be run off of a U3 flash drive without any install or admin permissions required on the host machine.
It's a proprietary technology, and supported by only a few vendors that I've seen.
If you really want portability and power, consider VMWare Player, and carry and entire machine, customized to your needs, on the flash drive. Of course, your friend would probably have to allow you to install VMWare Player.
Related
Currently I am working on the development of CATIA by C++ and Automation Interface. Everything is based on local environment of every client machine. After updating our program, clients have to deploy it manually after receiving the updated one.
We are considering if there is a way we could put our program on the server, and we assign the authorizations to the specific clients to access it. They still need install CATIA in their local machine, but our customization programs are on the website.
Our program is based on COM component, so this is a priority.
Any feasible idea?
Thanks in advance.
I'm developing programs for Catia too (VB .NET) and there might be a solution to use webbrowser to manage the programs but I'm unable to help with that :)
Instead what I use is selfdeveloped feature which updates the tools exe files on client from network storage or FTP.
Think of it as algorithm which searches certain folders or storage and decides if the program should update itself and lets the user know. Then you run the updater which is not part of the tool (separate program) and he make the changes on the main exe (copy files, config, remove add etc.)
This way you don't have to take care of the deployment and the user only clicks the update. That's it :)
My custom Cocoa-based setup.app on Mac OSX that I made in Objective C needs to install a LaunchDaemon for doing elevated privilege tasks such as an antivirus program that needs to scan the entire hard drive and therefore needs root privileges. How can I make my setup application prompt the customer for their admin login and then install that LaunchDaemon into /Library/LaunchDaemons (and note I don't mean ~/Library/LaunchDaemons)?
The way I'm currently handling it is by using AppleScript with the admin privilege. It prompts for this login and then the AppleScript does the copying into this folder without the OS complaining. However, I assume that's not the proper technique -- that I should be doing this entirely in Objective C somehow?
Note that I can't use SMBlessJob in this case because it is for this reason that I'm creating the Launch Daemon in the first place.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
I have a special need to create a custom setup.app -- just like the fact that Norton's AV application uses a custom setup.app. This is because the Apple PKG and DMG installers do not permit downloading of very large files (like virus definitions) from a server during install with some kind of friendly feedback. I mean, I can make a PKG file download a file from the server when running a Perl script or Bash script, but then the installer just hangs the progress bar for the amount of minutes it takes to download, not giving any other feedback to the user except that hung progress bar, and so the user thinks the installer is broke, when it's not. That's why I had to make my own custom setup.app, just like Norton did for their AV application.
Normally, SMJobBless would be the technique to do this. It's the one Apple recommends now as of 2016. Here's the readme.txt for Apple's sample project:
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/samplecode/SMJobBless/Listings/ReadMe_txt.html
However, that's not the only way to do it. Another route would be to have your installer use AppleScript to prompt and run a Bash or Perl script with elevated privileges to install the LaunchDaemon, as well. (That's actually easier than SMJobBless.)
Basically, either technique installs a LaunchDaemon (e.g., "service") into a special folder, and that daemon can be set with elevated privileges, which can then run anything you want -- even command line commands. A super fantastic explanation of LaunchDaemons and LaunchAgents is here:
http://launchd.info/
Now, the problem is how to communicate with it from your application, once installed. They leave that up to you, and there are various techniques. However, they also leave it up to you to secure this so that it's not an attack vector.
A fantastic article on how to do IPC (Inter Process Communication between your application and this service) is here:
http://nshipster.com/inter-process-communication/
One IPC protocol on OSX is Distributed Objects, which is quite smooth from an architecture perspective -- you'll feel more like it's "coding" instead of "sending messages back and forth" like other IPC protocols. I've written a Stack Overflow post on this because the docs are shoddy and the existing examples on the Apple site and others are stale (won't compile on XCode7.1 with OSX 10.10+).
On communication protocol between your application and daemon/service, you can probably get away with key/value, XML, or JSON messages that are encrypted with AES256 with a long password and converted to Base64 encoding, and then use one of the various IPC mechanisms. However, that's another topic entirely.
Is it possible for a website to automatically find a folder on usb stick and upload all the files in it to the web server by clicking only one button?
The problem is that I don't know how to make upload form automatically detect usb stick as the drive name(ie. G:, F:, etc) may vary from computer to computer, so hard coding path is not possible.
Ps. I'm using yii framework for site development, but can add a new page that will handle this in any other language as the client really wants this feature.
Web sites are not allowed to set default files to upload (it's a major security risk!). Also, web sites cannot scan the hard drive/enumerate what file systems exist on a system, again, for security purposes.
It might be possibly to do this with Flash/Silverlight/Java. Java seems the most likely to allow a web developer to do this (Java plugin seems to be quite willing to give out every permission under the Sun).
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Allowing automatic uploads in web browsers would be a huge security hole so the browsers intentionally prevent it. Even if you manage to find a hole that permits it, the browser makers will break it as soon as they find out.
However, if you have an environment where an actual separate program can be installed on the end user's computer you could easily write a program to do automated uploads of specified directories when launched.
I want to write an application that saves some shared settings on the local computer. But the problem is that anyone, including guests, should be able to use it.
So if a guest runs this application, it should be able to write data to persistent storage where everyone has r/w permissions.
The application can be launched from read-only media. So executable local files are off limits.
Do modern OSes support such scenario? Windows is supposed to have "All Users\Application Data", but it seems to be a junction point of some sort on W7, with weird permissions.
No idea about Linux and Mac at all.
If you look at the Linux ecosystem (especially the Ubuntu and Alestic EC2 images) there is a common technique where the VMs are pre-configured to look at the EC2 user-data and use it as a boot script. The nice thing about this approach is that you can write a boot script that further provisions your machine, allowing you to avoid making a new image every time your software that runs on the machine changes.
I want to do the same thing for Windows, but given that I'm an Mac and Linux guy, I'm a bit lost on where to start. My requirements are:
This must run on Windows Server 2008
A bootstrap script needs to start when the machine boots up, read the user-data file by pulling down the contents http://169.254.169.254/1.0/user-data
The bootstap script then needs to run the contents of that file as if it were a script
The script embedded in the user-data needs to run in such a way that it has access to the desktop environment (ie: it can launch a browser, etc).
I'm not quite sure how services work in Windows or if I need to enable auto-login, so any advice here would be appreciated. The ultimate goal is to run a Java program that launches some custom software that in turn launches a web browser (IE, Firefox, etc) and is capable of taking screenshots.
The screenshot part is interesting, because in the past when I've tried this the only way I could get something other than a black screen was to have UltraVNC or RealVNC boot up as a service, though I don't know why that helped.
I'm looking for answers to three specific questions, as well as any general advice:
Should I be focussing on a Windows service or auto-login + bat file in the "Startup" folder?
If I use a Windows service, is there anything special that I need to do to make sure desktop access and/or screenshots are available?
Do you recommend any tools for common Linux commands, like curl or wget? Last time I used Windows I used Cygwin a lot, but is there something more appropriate to use here?
I have not tried auto-login on Windows instances in EC2, but here's the support document on how to enable it.
We boot-strap our Windows instances using a custom AMI with a custom Windows 'install' service already installed. The boot-strap installer reads a URL from user-data at startup. The URL points to a ZIP file stored in S3. The installer then downloads, un-zips, and executes the actual application installer -- in our case a simple CMD fie.
This setups allows us to have one base AMI and then be able to easily overlay 15+ different application configurations (without having to rebuild the AMI). If you only have one application configuration this may be overkill for your situation.
The only trouble we ran into was having our installer service start to early -- changing the service startup mode to "Automatic Delayed" fixed that issue.
We wrote our boot-strap installer in Java, launched via YAJSW, because we're comfortable with it. If you just want a few simple Unix tools, most are available pre-compiled for Windows, for example wget.
For something completely different, you could try PsExec to configure the instance after it has booted.
You can try using RightScale's free developer account to create plain Powershell scripts and associate them with your Windows instances to run at boot time. The RightScale dashboard solves exactly the problems you are trying to solve above.
DISCLAIMER: I work for RightScale.
As for screen capture CutyCapt is a simple tool you can point at a URL and generate an image from.
Unxutils is a great solution for those looking for unix tools on Windows. It's got the wget.exe that you're looking for, however, using Powershell to download stuff is not so bad either:
$wc = new-object system.net.webclient
$wc.DownloadFile("http://stackoverflow.com","test.html")
If you can write a batch file to do your setup, then you can run it at startup of the vm by doing this:
1. Run REGEDT32.EXE.
2. Modify the following value within HKEY_CURRENT_USER:
Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ParseAutoexec
1 = autoexec.bat is parsed
0 = autoexec.bat is not parsed
As an answer to #3, I would say that you can do just about anything in a batch file that you need which includes downloading from a ftp server (but not from a http server). I am really interested in this stuff and so if you have questions, try asking me.
If you use Elastic Beanstalks you can use this:
Customizing the Software on EC2 Instances Running Windows
It uses YAML formatting standards, e.g.
packages:
msi:
mysql: http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/Connector-Net/mysql-connector-net-6.6.5.msi/from/http://cdn.mysql.com/
or
sources:
"c:/myproject/myapp": http://s3.amazonaws.com/mybucket/myobject.zip
I know this is a little bit late to help out with the original post but for anyone who is still reading this one solution is to use the http://cloudinitnet.codeplex.com/ project. The service is easily installed using a powershell script and will create a local administrator account to use while running.
The goal for this project was to replace the Cloud-Init project used in Amazon Linux and Ubuntu.