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Saturday, June 08, 2002

Help !  How do I Selectively Circumvent the Extremely Silly Windows Protected Storage Service? The more I use Windows NT / 2000 / XP at times, the more I get just plain frustrated with "protected storage".  This feature which is designed to protect you seems as often as not to bite your right in the proverbial keister (that's a colloquial americanism for "Your Butt" or "Your Ass").  Here's my current "Why is Microsoft so Silly Bitch Fest".  I'm co-administrator of a Linux box and the other admin has the very reasonable request of wanting to know what changes I make (I have the same request for him).  We've been emailing them back and forth and I realized -- "That's just stupid" so I set SecureCRT (a pretty good product with silly ass defaults and some silly ass design choices but good overall.  Note to product designers -- when options can be set on a per item basis i.e. the login profile then they ALMOST ALWAYS need to be settable on a global basis too).  So I set SecureCRT up to log my stuff in this profile to a text file.  I then created a job with www.ftpvoyager.com on a 1 hour schedule to FTP the file up.  Here's the problem, when I am in SecureCRT, this occurs when you externally access the log file: N:homescottlinuxlog>copy log.txt log1.txt The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.         0 file(s) copied. DOS commands can't access the file and NEITHER can FTP voyager.  And, to make it worse, if FTP Voyager can't access it, it FTP's up a 0 byte file thus deleting the log.  That's another silly ass design choice. So, the question becomes: Is there a better way to do this?  Can I use something on Linux to log all my commands either personally or as root? And, even if there is a Linux solution, is there a way besides shutting down the Protected Storage service overall to get around it on a file by file or directory by directory basis. Results written up here with, of course, links back to your blog.   Help gratefully appreciated.  I suspect that I'm not the only one who hits this kind of problem so better to get it documented publicly for people to find with Google than not. 8:33:11 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This