Winexe: To run code on windows machines from Linux

References:
The instructions on this post are a summary of information collected from this link. And I made some changes to it as well

These are instructions of how to get winexe working on Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS system

To begin with make sure your system has the required libraries:

sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf checkinstall

You will also need the python development libraries and header files:

sudo aptitude install python python-all python-dev python-all-dev python-setuptools

Now get the source code of winexe using svn. And apply the first patch:

svn co http://dev.zenoss.org/svn/trunk/wmi/Samba/source
cd source
wget https://gist.github.com/raw/843062/5bb87c4fa13688f65ca8b1e54fc42676aee42e5a/fix_winexe_service.diff
patch -p0 -i fix_winexe_service.diff

Now there is bug in the source/winexe/service.c file:
replace file

#define NT_STATUS_SERVICE_DOES_NOT_EXIST NT_STATUS(0xc0000424)

with

#define NT_STATUS_SERVICE_DOES_NOT_EXIST NT_STATUS(0x00000424)

Save,close and you are ready to compile:

cd source/
./autogen.sh
./configure
make proto bin/winexe
sudo cp bin/winexe /usr/local/bin/

and now you can test that that winexe is working correctly by doing:

winexe -W WORKGROUP -U Administrator%SecretPassword //192.168.xxx.xxx 'cmd.exe'

Disable Sudo password prompts on Ubuntu

A simple trick to disable the sudo password prompts on Ubuntu (I have tested this on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala). A word of caution, be aware that by doing this you are sacrificing the security that sudo provides.

You basically need to edit the /etc/sudoers file. This file cannot be changed by any user. You need to sign in as root and then use the visudo command to start editing the file.

user@machine:~$ sudo su

[sudo] password for user:

root@machine:/home/user# visudo

In this file, right at the bottom you will find a line:

%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

Replace it with:

%admin ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL

This will disable the requirement to enter the password every time you run a sudo command. Save and close (ESC, :wq, ENTER)

So you can now run a command like sudo reboot without having to enter the password:

user@machine:~$ sudo reboot

Broadcast message from user@machine

(/dev/pts/0) at 11:17 ...

The system is going down for reboot NOW!

Again, be careful and know what you are doing. Also, it might be a good idea to make a copy of your /etc/sudoers file before your make any changes to it.

One way to use this trick could be in a scenario where you want to run a sudo command through a script and do not want to use the -S option of sudo (-S option allows you to provide the password from the script itself; this can be dangerous if someone gets access to your script)

Add commands to bash

This post is about adding user defined commands to bash so that you can run applications only using the command rather than specifying the whole path of the application executable.

The code provided here has been tested on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

There are two ways to accomplish the mission, the first is to put your application is the default path that bash already looks into while trying to execute your command, and the second is to add another location as a path that bash must check.

For the first option, run $PATH in the terminal. Your terminal output would look something like

bash: /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games

If you put your scripts/executables in any of the above locations, bash will find it and execute it without you having to specify the whole path.

For the second option, you need to edit the ~/.bashrc file and add the location of the executable to the PATH locations. Suppose this location is /home/pbhat/bin/. Concatenate the following line to the end of ~/.bashrc file.

PATH=$PATH:/home/pbhat/bin

export PATH

Save and close the file and now run the following command in the terminal:

source ~.bashrc

Unless you run this command the updated path will not show up.