Allow Non-Admins To Update Firefox
Monday, December 17, 2007
One of my clients had the problem of users being excessively prompted to update Firefox
A new version of Firefox is available:
It is strongly recommended that you upgrade Firefox as soon as possible
It then shows the "Download and Install Now" button but eventually fails when a normal users runs it because they are not local admins. This prompt repeats over and over until IT gets a phone call about how they hate Firefox and are going to go back to using IE.
It's actually as simple as you may think. If you change "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox" to allow "YOURDOMAIN\Domain Users" write access, a normal user can update Firefox.
You can go around to each workstation but where is the fun in that? The builtin program "cacls" with the help of PSExec will let you update all of the computers on a site. This idea was put together by my friend with a little tweaking on my part. Basically you just create a list of computers, and then run the command remotely on each one.
Create a List of Computers
You can do this however you'd like but for me I like to export a list of computers them from ADUC. This will only help if your computers are in the same folder or OU. You could always just write down the names of the computers but that's boring.
- Open Active Directory Users and Computers
- From the menu bar choose View > Add / Remove Columns
- Remove all columns that are not Name [Type, Description] and click OK
- Open the folder or OU that contains the computers you would like to update
- Right-click on the folder or OU and choose "Export List..."
- Save the file as "computer_list.txt" somewhere logical to you
Create the Script
Here is the entire command all together. Hopefully it's obvious to change the YOURDOMAIN\ADMIN_ACCOUNT to an account that is a member of the Domain Admins group and change YOURDOMAIN\Domain Users to whatever your domain is.
You will want to put this into a batch file because you'll have to run it again or on a regular basis if some of your computers are turned off or not on the network when you're running the script.
External Links
http://woodruffrc.com/allow-non-admin-users-to-update-firefox.html/trackback - link to my friend's website who actually did the testing and put everything together
Labels: active directory, firefox, psexec, system administration, update
One of my clients had the problem of users being excessively prompted to update Firefox
A new version of Firefox is available:
It is strongly recommended that you upgrade Firefox as soon as possible
It then shows the "Download and Install Now" button but eventually fails when a normal users runs it because they are not local admins. This prompt repeats over and over until IT gets a phone call about how they hate Firefox and are going to go back to using IE.
It's actually as simple as you may think. If you change "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox" to allow "YOURDOMAIN\Domain Users" write access, a normal user can update Firefox.
You can go around to each workstation but where is the fun in that? The builtin program "cacls" with the help of PSExec will let you update all of the computers on a site. This idea was put together by my friend with a little tweaking on my part. Basically you just create a list of computers, and then run the command remotely on each one.
Create a List of Computers
You can do this however you'd like but for me I like to export a list of computers them from ADUC. This will only help if your computers are in the same folder or OU. You could always just write down the names of the computers but that's boring.
- Open Active Directory Users and Computers
- From the menu bar choose View > Add / Remove Columns
- Remove all columns that are not Name [Type, Description] and click OK
- Open the folder or OU that contains the computers you would like to update
- Right-click on the folder or OU and choose "Export List..."
- Save the file as "computer_list.txt" somewhere logical to you
Create the Script
Here is the entire command all together. Hopefully it's obvious to change the YOURDOMAIN\ADMIN_ACCOUNT to an account that is a member of the Domain Admins group and change YOURDOMAIN\Domain Users to whatever your domain is.
You will want to put this into a batch file because you'll have to run it again or on a regular basis if some of your computers are turned off or not on the network when you're running the script.
External Links
http://woodruffrc.com/allow-non-admin-users-to-update-firefox.html/trackback - link to my friend's website who actually did the testing and put everything together
Labels: active directory, firefox, psexec, system administration, update
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