Martin Zugec blog

Applications with hardcoded paths

In my citrix environment, I am trying to install on applications to D:\ drive. Most applications doesnt have problems with this, however some of them requires installation to C:\ drive.

 Sometimes you can fix these applications yourself, sometimes you can fix them with vendor or application support, however there are situations where you are not able to do anything about application locations.

 In this case I prefer to still install applications to D:\ drive and just create symbolic link to C:\ drive.

I am using Junction from SysInternals for such tasks.

So the process is:

a.) Install application to D:\Apps\AppX

b.) Configure security on D:\Apps\AppX

c.) Create symlink from D:\Apps\AppX to C:\XApp

What are you doing when you encounter such application?

New SysInternals update

I got one small script called Auto-Update - this script is automatically checking if new updates are available and if they really are available, it will download them.

 Today I noticed new tools from Sysinternals (yes, I know they are not new, I just havent run this script last month ;)).

Updated utilities are ZoomIt, Streams, String, PsExec, SigCheck and DiskExt.

I tried to find list of changes, so here they are:

• ZoomIt - you can type text while zoomed and you can also create scratch pad by clearing screen.
• Streams - Streams now supports printing and deleting streams on volume root directories. There is also new -accepteula switch - hope so it will be included with every single utility :(
• String - improving performance by limiting no. of bytes that it is reading
• PsExec - Officially this release to PsExec, a utility for running programs on remote systems, corrects a buffer overflow bug caused by long command line arguments. Unofficialy as I found out - it also fixes bug with running PsExec against local computer (PsExec \\%ComputerName% cmd is giving you error regarding user name or password). Finally :) This is quite pain when you got automated processing.
• SigCheck - new switches -a and -m (more version data and manifests)
• DiskExt - now reports the mappings for volume that have not been mounted by a file system.

Regarding PsExec bug, I found it myself, because I really hated this one - rest was taken from RSS here:
http://blogs.technet.com/sysinternals/rss.xml

Most of you probably know RSS for Mark Russinovich blog (http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/rss.xml), however this is maybe even more important for us ;)