Exporting data as another user

[Guest]

Hello,
I am using the stand alone exporter tool to collect information on several servers (NT/2k/2k3), many are members of workgroups. Is it possible to specify user credentials (servername\UserName [UserName will vary]) when configuring data to export? Thanks.

[kstanush]

Re: Exporting data as another user

No, there isn't any way to do this. We've looked at it, and found that there are just too many technical and security hurdles with doing it. The main problems are that there isn't a central mechanism in Windows for application to specify an alternate credential set and different Microsoft functions require a different credential mechanism. Plus, if Exporter Pro were run in a batch file, the username/password would either have to be specified on the command line, or in the configuration file, which could cause a security problem.

Here are some ideas, though:

1. If you run Exporter Pro through the RunAs mechanism in Windows, then whatever security information supplied there will be used by Windows for the remote servers.

2. The Windows pass-through authentication mechanism should still work, so if you had a local admin account on the workgroup servers with the same userid/password as your domain admin account, you should be able to export anything.

3. The Manage Passwords option in Control Panel is another method that should let you specify an alternate credential set which Windows will then use when anything is accessed on a matching remote system.

4. Most Windows functions (except AD and WMI) will use an existing IPC$ connection when accessing remote systems. So, you could from the command line, do:

net use \\workgroup_server\ipc$ /user:xxx password

After running any exports, you can simply:

net use \\workgroup_server\ipc$ /d

This is the same thing that Exporter Pro would do anyway if it had a way of prompting and storing an alternate username/password combination.