jslaker's questions

Pretty straightforward one that I'm having trouble finding an answer to.

serverfault previously helped me with finding a way to automate Windows updates without using WSUS. It's working fantastically, but to run it over the network, you have to first mount a shared drive. That's pretty simple XP since you just mount the drive and run the updater.

On Vista and W7, though, this all has to be done with elevated privileges to work correctly. The UAC account can't see network drives mounted by the regular user, so in order to get everything working, I have to mount the share via net use from an escalated shell. I'd like to automate mounting this share and launching the updater via a simple .bat file.

I could probably just instruct everybody to right click "Run as Administrator" on the .bat file, but I'd like to keep things as simple as possible and have the .bat automatically prompt the user to escalate their privileges.

Since these computers don't belong to us, I can't count on anything like Powershell being installed, so that rules any solution along those lines out and pretty much have to rely on things that would be included in an RTM Vista install. I'm hoping I'm mostly missing something obvious here. :)

Basic scenario is a PC repair shop where there's a lot of time being essentially wasted downloading/installing Windows updates on individual machines. I had intended to set up an in-house WSUS server to deal with this, but as I got into the install documentation, I found that the WSUS license specifically disallows serving updates to computers that don't belong to your organization.

Since I try rather hard to keep everything legal (even if the license restriction is a bit asinine), I'm trying to find alternatives to WSUS that would allow deploying locally cached Windows updates, preferably over the network, in as automated a manner as possible.