Installing an MSI (Windows Installer Package File) in Microsoft Windows without administrator privileges

Assuming you have an MSI file you need to install as a non-Administrator user, open up a `cmd` window. (Press Windows Key-R and type 'cmd' in the box.)

💡 Drag and drop files and folders into the `cmd` window from the Explorer and it will insert the full path to the file or folder (thereby saving a lot of typing).

Type (and/or  drag paths!):

msiexec.exe /i C:\Path\To\something.msi
INSTALLDIR=C:\Path\to\someplace\where\your\user\has\write\access\
MSIINSTALLPERUSER=1 ALLUSERS=2

Additional information:

➤ If the value of the ALLUSERS property is set to 2, the Windows Installer always resets the value of the ALLUSERS property to 1 and performs a per-machine installation or it resets the value of the ALLUSERS property to an empty string ("") and performs a per-user installation. The value ALLUSERS=2 enables the system to reset the value of ALLUSERS, and the installation context, dependent upon the user's privileges and the version of Windows.

➤ The MSIINSTALLPERUSER and the ALLUSERS properties can be set by the user at installation time, through the user interface or on a command line, to request that the Windows Installer install a dual-purpose package for the current user or all users of the computer. To use the MSIINSTALLPERUSER property, the value of the ALLUSERS property must be 2 and the package has to have been authored to be capable of installation into either the per-user or a per-machine context. For information about authoring a dual-purpose package, see Single Package Authoring. If the value of the ALLUSERS property does not equal 2, the value of the MSIINSTALLPERUSER property is ignored and has no effect on the installation. The value of MSIINSTALLPERUSER property is ignored when installing the package using Windows Installer 4.5 or earlier.

pyWebDav <-> Windows 8.1: one-line file sharing, after a couple of registry tweaks

How often do you want to share a directory of files on one (*nix) system, and mount it as a network drive on a Windows host, with minimum hassle? For me, this is a common occurrence. After a couple of adjustments to my Windows 8 machine, I can do this after installing the pywebdav module, making for a one-liner that creates a temporary high-throughput network share that can be mounted as a drive in Windows.

The annoying part of this trick is that it takes a couple of registry tweaks, and this may affect other resources shared through WebClient, notably, SharePoint.

The easy part of this is installing the pyWebDav Python package, and running a one-line command to start a WebDAV server. Install this (in BSD we type pkg install py27-PyWebDAV). The -D option specifies the directory to share, and I like to know what the program is thinking (verbose with -v option):

davserver -D directory_to_share -n -H server_ip_address_here -v

davserver needs the IP address of the network resource that it will use to listen for connection requests. You can test the server using the loopback address and a webdav client installed on the same machine.

Now for the more annoying part: registry changes, with some commentary. On a Windows machine, navigate to the following subkey in regedit:

HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/WebClient/Parameters

Modify these values:

SupportLocking=0x0 (default=0x1) 

REQUIRED for interoperability with pyWebDav. 

• davserver's -J parameter appears buggy / nonfunctional with Windows 8, so we have to modify the registry.

FileSizeLimitInBytes=0xffffffff (or whatever, default is 50 000 000d)

Optional, but you should change this.

• The default value of this is only 50 megabytes, which is really useless for ISOs or whatnot. I recommend 4.2 gigabytes, which is what this value represents. A bigger value would be preferable. Fix this, Microsoft! We've moved on to use terabyte devices.

BasicAuthLevel=0x2

Optional change, useful if you add basic authentication (which pyWebDav supports)

• 0 - Basic authentication disabled
• 1 - Basic authentication enabled for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) shares only (default)
• 2 or greater - Basic authentication enabled for SSL shares and for non-SSL shares

Now that you've made these changes, you can restart the WebClient service. Launch cmd with administrator privileges and type:

net stop  WebClient
net start WebClient

 Mount the share (note that you'll need to do this in a cmd shell WITHOUT administrator privileges for your user to see the drive):

net use * http://server_ip_address:8008/

You can also map network drives using a more GUI method.

Sweet!

Concatenating PDF files using Windows Shell Add-ons

I was tasked with finding a good utility that would allow me to highlight a number of PDF files in the Windows Explorer, and then right-click to concatenate (combine) the files together to form one large PDF file.

PDFTk, the PDF toolkit, does this very well from the command line; however, the prospect of using a command-line tool is daunting to the average user.

I found a FANTASTIC tool called pdftk4all. It functions as a very easy-to-use front end to pdftk. Plus, it integrates a plethora of common features into a series of logical, easy-to-use contextual menus. As a programmer, one of the best features of this program is that its source code includes a very simple example of how to create cascading contextual menus for the Windows Explorer shell.

As best I can tell, there is truly no reason to purchase Adobe Acrobat.

Thank you to Maarten Veerman for PDFTK4ALL!