HOWTO edit HKEY_CURRENT_USER that's not the ansible user?

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1

I need to make edits to HKEY_CURRENT_USER of a different user then the ansible_user.

How do I do that?

Any edits I make with win_regmerge are made to the ansible_user’s registry.

I tried become_method: runas with become_user: but that throws a warning and error.

[WARNING]: The Windows ‘runas’ become method is experimental, and may change significantly in future Ansible releases.

FAILED! => {“failed”: true, “msg”: “The ‘runas’ become method requires a password (specify with the ‘-K’ CLI arg or the ‘ansible_become_password’ variable)”}

I come from a linux/unix background so I thought runas would be like sudo would let me run the command as the become_user but I guess runas is a little different.

Any help?

Thanks.

2

Hey

Windows unfortunately doesn’t have the concept of sudo like unix so to be able to run a process as another user you need to set the password as well as the username. Going by the error message you need to set ‘ansible_become_password’ to the password of the account you are wanting to run as. I haven’t played around with runas unfortunately so I can’t give you any more info.

Another option if you really want to go the route is using the ‘HKEY_USERS’ key. The entry for ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER’ in ‘HKEY_USERS’ is located in this key under the SID (S-----*). So using the ‘user’ account as an example I can use this command to get the SID of the Administrator account

$AdObj = New-Object System.Security.Principal.NTAccount('user') $strSID = $AdObj.Translate([System.Security.Principal.SecurityIdentifier]) $strSID.Value

It will return the value

S-1-5-21-2607664055-1112657780-300677247-500

So the ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER’ when running as ‘user’ can also be accessed at ‘HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-2607664055-1112657780-300677247-500’.

Hope this helps in some way.

Thanks

Jordan

3

So the ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER’ when running as ‘user’ can also be accessed at ‘HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-2607664055-1112657780-300677247-500’.

I put the edits into the HKEY_USERS\S-----* should they show up in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER when I’m logged in as that user?

It doesn’t look like it.

4

http://bit.ly/2tcKt3L

Difference between HKEY_Current_User and HKEY_USERs?

Suggests edits to HKEY_USERS should be reflected in HKEY_CURRENT_USER