Open a Socket!

I’ve been working with both Vista and Windows Server 2008 for quite a while now, but I still manage to fall foul of User Account Control, especially when working from the command prompt.  As you will no doubt be aware, there are certain tasks that need elevated privileges and these require you to open the command window as Administrator (you do this by right-clicking the command prompt icon and selecting “Run As Administrator”).

If you try to run tasks that require elevated privilege in a normal (i.e. unprivileged) command window, one of two things will happen.  Either the command that you are attempting to run will tell you that it requires elevated privileges, or it will fail with an (often obscure and unhelpful) error message.  Here’s an example.

The other day I wanted to run the Active Directory Schema MMC snap-in (schmmgmt.msc) on a DC.  To access the snap-in you first need to register a dll named schmmgmt.dll.  The command to do this is:

 regsvr32 schmmgmt.dll

On a Windows Server 2008 machine this activity requires elevated privileges, so you need to run the command as Administrator.  If you don’t, you will see the error below.

The module “schmmgmt.dll” was loaded but the call to DllRegisterServer failed with the error code  0x80040201

It took me a good few minutes to work out what I had done wrong. Doh!  Hopefully I’ll eventually get the hang of User Account Control.