While looking in Terminal Services Manager on one of my SQL boxes, I noticed that there are seemingly many attempts to remote to the machine while I was connected:
One minute...
And the next...
I'm not seeing anything that seems to match this activity in the event viewer, and it's continuing. Where might I look to find out where these are coming from and what might be going on?
Is it possible to see which permissions an application installer needs while it is running? I'm thinking sort of like a debugger or monitor to see what windows is checking for.
The situation is that we have an in-house developed windows app that updates itself regularly, and users have always been running under local admin accounts so that this update works. I find that to be a bit too much for my liking and would like to grant only the necessary permissions for this installer to work properly.
It may be impossible for me to change the behavior of the installer, or to even examine the steps that it is taking directly.
Is it possible to see exactly which permissions windows is stopping at while running this installer?
I've been able to determine that the installer needs write access to C:\Windows and C:\Windows\System32 because of specific error messages, but after that, it stops at a rather generic "You do not have access to make the required system configuration modifications. Please rerun this installation from an administrators account."
If I'm capturing an image with imagex.exe /capture ..., does it matter if I defrag the hard disk prior to doing so (or strictly speaking, before sysprep)? Is there any benefit to doing so with a file-based imager like this? Would there be any benefit to defragging after applying the image?
I am asking about defragging non-SSD drives. I believe defragging an SSD is generally considered a no-no.
I have several of the same machine (Dell Precision T3500) that originally came with Windows 7 Pro (there is a Windows 7 Pro OA product key sticker on top of each one). These were initially downgraded to XP by a former IT colleague, but are now back in the pool of unused machines. I am looking to format and install Windows 7 Pro on one of them using the latest official Win7 installer ISO with SP1 and then clone the hard drive to the other machines.
The questions then, are:
Does this even make sense, or is there a better way to do this considering I'm only doing it to 6 machines?
Does this jive with MS licensing (we are the original purchaser of the machines, and thus, presumably, the license holder...but I'm no expert)?
Is it possible to apply the individual 25-char product keys to the cloned machines after cloning?
How far can I go in the config process (installing corporate standard apps and such) before I have to clone to the other machines considering the licensing/key questions?
UPDATE
My final process was to build one box, sysprep /oobe ... and capture/deploy with imagex. The license keys activate fine online after imaging. I'm not sure how to script domain, printer, etc. after imaging, but that's for another question someday. The time saved with Win updates and IDE installs alone was well worth it. Thanks, all.