Monday, August 19, 2013

A response to Cygwin's "setup.exe" requiring administrator privileges



Shaddy Baddah in his message setup.exe now requires administrator privileges identifies a problem.  For reasons that escape me Cygwin, in a departure from the minimalistic intrusive installs of the past, now demands administrator rights. Tired of granting Admin rights to everything, I decided that there must be a better way. Starting from the following screenshot, let's fix this.

Notice, that the windows security badge is there... 
Opening up the file with a hex editor you get...


changing that to this by spacing out the line
 
results in
 

 which seems to install without any problems, and also makes me question the windows security paradigm.  Seems strange to also point out that the decisions made to require higher privileges appears to be an unnecessary overreach of rights.

Afternote: I only saw Yaakov's response before running off to find this solution.  If you read through all the message tree, the original poster tried to replace the line with a different line.  This was unsuccessful, as I'm sure that the change altered the binary in a minor way.  Having had to execute similar changes to Java Class files, for which the source was misplaced, I was careful not to alter the length, simply replace with spaces and save in hex.

No comments:

Post a Comment