Description

Bomgar enables virtual support reps to escalate privileges on remote computers to administrative privileges. This Video demonstrates the same run-as-administrator capabilities on Vista.

Transcript

In this sixth video, we are going to get into an advanced topic involving one of the icons that I skipped in the earlier presentation. And to do that let us talk a little bit of how these session begin. If you recall from the earlier training video, the user, in my case me using a virtual machine started this session by clicking on my name. So this is a user initiated session. Now the user of that virtual machine was logged in with normal user mode privileges, not as an administrator. Therefore, eventhough you are in control of your desktop, you are still using the user contacts. You have no more power than the user themselves has on their desktop. So as a support representative you know sometimes you need to do great and powerful things. So for those occasions, we have a little god badge guy over here on the top right, that says, elevate customer client privileges. Now remember customer client is the name of the application, that little 639k application that is running on the remote machine. So when I press that icon, it is prompting me for some window administrative credential on the target system. So this could be a local administrative credentials or domain administrative credentials you know what ever. If you do not have this credentials and the user does, you can flip this dialogue around and let the user enter their credentials so that you can achieve elevation without them having to give up their credentials to you. So I am going to click on OK, it is prompting the user and I can accept that, I can say yes on behalf of the user to accept this operation and now something really cool is happening under the covers. That customer client that have been running as a user mode application just reinstalled itself as a service running with administrative credentials. So now with no further interaction from the user, we have now access to administrative credentials and as you can see the little gold badge guy is grade out, that let us know that we are running with elevated credentials. And now for instance over here under some special actions, we can do something like set a restore point that was not in that drop down list previously because it requires administrative authority. This gold badge guy is also the secret to happiness when you are dealing with Windows Vista. So let us go back to my sessions tab and we are going to run through this process again using a Windows Vista virtual machine. So just start the Internet Explorer, as I am sure you aware if you have any Explorers to Windows Vista, you have the user account control prompts that you see a list on the television commercials, so let me go ahead and establish a session. And I am just like before I am going to click on my name, say run in order to download it and say run. See, by default users on Vista, run with a user context even if they have administrative capability. So it is quite different or it can be quite different from supporting an XP customer. So let me go back over to my representative client and here is my incoming request from support for the Vista machine, double click on that and let us permit this, let me tidy up a little bit and I want to have a -- too busy of a desktop. So right now if I start doing things, administrative things, we are going to have a UAC props that I might not be able to see, that the user would have to respond to, and we certainly do not want that situation. So as I mention the gold bade guy is the key to happiness for supporting Vista. So we are going to have to click on the gold badge guy, elevate customer client privileges, enter my administrative credentials. In this case I am entering administrative credentials but we could flip this prompt over the customer and let them enter their credentials, they do not have be, if they are normal Vista user credentials also have administrative authority then they could enter those as well, so let us say OK and I am going to say yes for the user. Now let us switch over to the virtual machine because on the Vista side they are giving a UAC prompt that I cannot see as a support representative. So now acting as the user, I am just going to say continue and accept that UAC prompt, and now just like before, the customer client is being reinstalled as a service running in Vista. So let us clean up a little bit here, minimize the virtual machine, go back to my rep client. So now you can see the gold badge guy is grade out. That tells me that I am running with the administrative credentials. Now I can do something on the Vista machine, let us just go in to computer management, now that is going to trigger a UAC prompt but as you can see, as a support representative I am able to respond to it. So once you elevate credentials within Windows Vista, you should have no further UAC prompts that you as a support representative cannot respond to. So that kind of covers the elevation of privileges and dealing with the special case of supporting Windows Vista. In the next session we are going to talk about the reboot options over here on the reboot button.