Is there a way to have a user kick off a deployment?
The short version of the question: Is there a way to put a shortcut or other icon on the Public desktop that a non-admin user could use to kick off a deployment? This would be on Windows 10 computers.
I have found a previous post that talked about using PSExec to do it, and that worked when I used an admin account that has access to the PDQ server. Here is the post I had found
The following command will run the pdqdeploy.exe on the server, Stanhope, and will deploy the "Baseline Apps" package on two computers, Quintana and Costanza.
psexec \\stanhope -h -accepteula "c:\program files (x86)\Admin Arsenal\PDQ Deploy\pdqdeploy.exe" Deploy -Package "Baseline Apps" -Targets Quintana Costanza
The longer version: We have about 600 computers that are being used by people all across our state and we are looking to give them a new computer and then copy their profile from the old computer to the new one at a time that is convenient for them. They are not always in the office and often are using cell signals to connect to the network. We don't really want them to do the copying over the cell connection and would like them to be able to do this when they are in the office.
I have a package set up in PDQ deploy that will work beautifully when I use the Deploy Now option, but I am hoping there is a way to create a icon that they could click on to start the process when it is convenient for them without them having to call in and get an admin to run it. Since these icons would go out to so many users I also don't want to have any sort of admin credentials hard wired in to them.
Thank you in advance for any help you can offer,
Mike Blum
Comments
I'm not aware of a way of doing this. Depending on what your built package looks like, if it's just a powershell script or something like that, why not just copy that script to the user's Public Desktop?
I ended up finding a way to make it work and wanted to share in case others come looking for a similar solution. To make it work I had to add two arguments to the psexec command. I had to use the -u and -p arguments to put in a user name and password. To help protect the user name and password I created a hidden folder to hold the batch file that specifically denied users the right to list folder contents and then created a shortcut to the batch file that is placed on the Public user's desktop. The command in the batch file looks like this now
I found that to read the batch file a user had to first change their view settings to see hidden files and then right click on the folder and change the security settings, which requires admin rights. To increase the security of the situation I created a new user that basically could only start processes on the PDQ server and not do anything else. The batch file that calls for the deployment deletes the shortcut on the desktop and the hidden folder after it successfully calls for the deployment, so the hidden batch file doesn't stay on the computer any longer than it absolutely has to.