Rob Farley

Rob Rob Farley has been consulting in IT since completing a Computer Science degree with first class honours in 1997. Before moving to Adelaide, he worked in consultancies in Melbourne and London. He runs the development department in one of Australia's leading IT firms, as well as doing database application consultancy and training. He heads up the Adelaide SQL Server User Group, and holds several Microsoft certifications.

Rob has been involved with Microsoft technologies for most of his career, but has also done significant work with Oracle and Unix systems. His preferred database is SQL Server and his preferred language is C#. Recently he has been involved with Microsoft Learning in the US, creating and reviewing new content for the next generation of Microsoft exams.

Over the years, Rob's clients have included BP Oil, OneLink Transit, Accenture, Avanade, Australian Electorial Commission, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the Royal Borough of Kingston, Help The Aged, Unisys, Department of Treasury and Finance (Vic), National Mutual, the Bible Society and others.

Did you mean to come here? My blog is now at http://msmvps.com/blogs/robfarley



29 November 2005

Local admin

Maybe it's just that I appreciated what Jesper & Steve keep talking about...

A while back I ran through various things on my machine to try to encourage it to be slightly more secure. I know I didn't do everything I could've done, but I did some. Today I tried to run something (not something I wrote, something someone else wrote) and I got a nasty error. Tracked it down to the fact that Performance Counters were disabled. But as well as that, I wasn't running as a local administrator, which it seems I needed to be to allow access to said Performance Counters, all so that the system could detect if they were already running a copy of the app in question. I don't like having to be a local administrator. I don't let my kids run their computers as local administrators, and I would really rather not be one myself. Even more so, I don't want the people running my applications to have to be local administrator, and I try to make a point of not requiring it. Mind you, just about everyone I know runs under local admin, and I guess it's 'normal' to do so. I just don't like it. I guess I'm 'different'. Thanks, Jesper & Steve.

I'm looking forward to being able to escalate privilege as required.

Posted by Rob Farley at 11:12 am