joeware - never stop exploring... :)

It is muggy and nasty outside so I don’t want to play in the yard. Especially since I did a lot of yard work yesterday and got pretty crispy fried.
I don’t feel like doing some tile work I need to do in the house.

So I am sitting here in a nice air conditioned room looking at writing a tool to modify the SCM ACL for K3 SP1.

I start looking through my old C++ Dev folder to see what I can hack into place which should be faster than writing something from scratch. I come across an old tool called serviceperms that I wrote back in the late 90’s (when I don’t know for sure as I didn’t keep history then but I expect around 1995/1996) and last updated in January of 2000. I actually made this available to people prior to MS stepping up and giving us tools to manipulate the Service ACLs though I can’t find any google evidence of it.

As I sit here looking through it, it is just cracking me up. This code is well over 5-10 years old and it is amazing how differently I look at programming and Windows now. Makes me wish I could see code I wrote for the PDP-11 running RSTS/E back in the late 80’s. Unfortunately the wide binder I had that had all of that printed on greenbar[1] has long since vanished in one of my numerous moves.

The only comments in the code are those comments where I am telling myself I need to add this or that or look for this or that bug some day and code that is commented out. Quite frankly, the code is much prettier without all of the comments in it. Normally I would say it would make it hard to read and understand but my variables are so long and descriptive and the whitespace is so well layed out, I can actually read and understand the code.

I am proud to say that even then I was using STL and safe strings. The parameter handling is pretty awkward and drawn out but works.

Overall, the program runs great. It could even enumerate ACLs on remote machines which I don’t think SUBINACL can do yet. However I am not sure if I can use it because my formatting and structure of programming has changed so much since I did this I would be rewriting most of it anyway.

Here is the sample output

F:\DEV\cpp\ServicePerms>serviceperms “alerter”

ServicePerms V02.00.00cpp Joe Richards (jricha34@hotmail.com) January 2000

Trustee: [NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM]
Access Mode: GRANT_ACCESS

Service Specific Permissions:
–Default–
All Default Service Specific Permissions
–Additional–
SERVICE_START
SERVICE_STOP
SERVICE_PAUSE_CONTINUE

Generic Permissions:
–Default–
All Default Generic Permissions
–Additional–

—————————————————

Trustee: [BUILTIN\Administrators]
Access Mode: GRANT_ACCESS

Service Specific Permissions:
–Default–
All Default Service Specific Permissions
–Additional–
SERVICE_CHANGE_CONFIG
SERVICE_START
SERVICE_STOP
SERVICE_PAUSE_CONTINUE

Generic Permissions:
–Default–
All Default Generic Permissions
–Additional–
DELETE
WRITE_DAC
WRITE_OWNER

—————————————————

Trustee: [NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users]
Access Mode: GRANT_ACCESS

Service Specific Permissions:
–Default–
All Default Service Specific Permissions
–Additional–

Generic Permissions:
–Default–
All Default Generic Permissions
–Additional–

—————————————————

Trustee: [BUILTIN\Power Users]
Access Mode: GRANT_ACCESS

Service Specific Permissions:
–Default–
All Default Service Specific Permissions
–Additional–
SERVICE_START
SERVICE_STOP
SERVICE_PAUSE_CONTINUE

Generic Permissions:
–Default–
All Default Generic Permissions
–Additional–

Command completed successfully.

[1] Don’t know what greenbar is/was? You youngster… Greenbar was/is fanfold paper with alternating green and white strips so you could easily visually break up the printout. It was great for code printouts because it helped focus your eyes. We often used 132 column greenbar and this is when we didn’t have variable width fonts so the paper was wide. Now you run around with a 132 column wide fanfold paper and people would look awfully strangely at you. We did have non-greenbar paper too but that was only used for printing ASCII Art…