Charlie Russel's Blog

I run as a limited user during my normal work, but I always keep one or more Admin windows open. These are logged in to my Domain Administrator account, running “As Administrator”. And I make sure I can tell that I’m running in that window by setting the colour scheme with a nice, dark red, background. Hard to miss! (I’ll show you how to do that in my next post. ) So, how do I do all that? Well, it starts by automatically opening a PowerShell window when I first log on, as described earlier here.

When that starts, I include code in my $Profile to first check how many PowerShell windows are already running, so I don’t start opening more if I don’t need them.

$PSH = Get-Process PowerShell

Simple, and let’s me get a count with $PSH.count. If this is the first PowerShell window I’ve opened ($PSH.count -lt 2) and this isn’t already an admin window, then I open an admin window. Let’s break this down: First, am I running as an Administrator?

# First, initialize $Admin to false 
$Admin = $False

# Then, find out who we are... 
$id = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent() 
$p = New-Object system.security.principal.windowsprincipal($id)

# Find out if we're running as admin (IsInRole). 
if ($p.IsInRole([System.Security.Principal.WindowsBuiltInRole]::Administrator)){ 
   $Admin = $True 
}

Now, a function to run an elevated window as the domain administrator.

Function Start-myAdmin () { 
# Get admin credentials 
$AdminCred = Get-Credential 
        -UserName TreyResearch\Administrator ` 
        -Message "Enter your password for the Administrator account: " 
# Start an elevated window, but with designated creds. 
Start-Process PowerShell.exe ` 
       -Credential $AdminCred ` 
       -ArgumentList "Start-Process PowerShell.exe -Verb RunAs" ` 
       -NoNewWindow

}

Good. So we’re going to want to start that admin window automatically when we first logon. We do that by checking the count of open PowerShell windows ($PSH.count)

# If this isn't already an Admin window, and we don't have lots of other PowerShell 
# windows open, then we start an Admin PowerShell window. 
if ( ! $Admin  ) {
   cd $home
   if ($Psh.count -lt 2 ) {
      Start-myAdmin
   }
}

Oh, and we’ll want an alias to be able to open up another one whenever we need it.

Set-Alias Admin -Value Start-myAdmin