Extra Notes on Using Ninite With Kaseya

Jim Lee wrote us with some more details on deploying Ninite installers via Kaseya. He says:

Here is some information for Kaseya users when scripting. It seems that I have to deploy Ninite packages as "user" accounts

(Though Rich Houk has notified us that things work fine running as SYSTEM as long as the cache location has Everyone with Full Access permissions. This is safe because Ninite verfies cached or downloaded files before automating them.)

KASEYA INFO

To be a little more verbose in that explanation...

As was said, running as SYSTEM runs whatever tasks you perform in the script as the local system account. Running as user will run it as the logged in user unless you specify an "impersonate" command before that (which is usually impersonating the specified administrator).

The real difference is that the SYSTEM account nearly always has full rights to everything on that machine. A logged in user might not, though impersonating the administrator usually will also have full rights to that machine.

The SYSTEM account, though, knows nothing about network resources like shared printers or shared folders on other computers. You can't, for instance, have a SYSTEM account copy a file from a share on a server to a local folder on that machine or run something located on a share on a server.

The user accounts, however, might or might not have access to those resources; if you run as the logged in user and that user doesn't have rights to a particular share, your script won't, either.

Running as a logged-in user, though, gives you access to things in that user's profile, home folder (if configured), etc. For instance, if you want to change settings that are specific to that user (like changing the desktop), you could easily do that within a script running as that user. Another example is changing the registry in the HKCU hive (h_key current user) which generally holds program and other settings that are particular to that user (like last opened files, etc.).

Generally, though, I use an "impersonate administrator" command and then run as user so that everything runs as the configured administrator. This generally gives my scripts full access to everything on that computer and everything on any network servers.

Thank you

I ran my script as "user" and silent and it worked perfectly. Seems as the above explanation clears it up. "system" has NO network resources.