Dimas Putra dimasahmad

I'm buiding a command line tool in Go that has an option to install itself as a service on Windows, which it needs admin rights for. I wanted to be able to have it reliably detect if it was running as admin already and if not, relaunch itself as admin. When the user runs the tool with the specific switch to trigger this functionality (-install or -uninstall in my case) they are prompted by UAC (User Account Control) to run the program as admin, which allows the tool to relaunch itself with the necessary rights.

To detect if I was admin, I tried the method described here first:
https://coolaj86.com/articles/golang-and-windows-and-admins-oh-my/
This wasn't accurately detecting that I was elevated, and was reporting that I was not elevated even when running the tool in CMD prompt started with "Run as Administrator" so I needed a more reliable method.

I didn't want to try writing to an Admin protected area of the filesystem or registry because Windows has the ability to transparently virtualize those writes

Sometimes you may need an unencrypted pair for your certificate (in my case, I need it for Docker Registry).

You can use OpenSSL to generate one. You will need:

OpenSSL (if you use Windows, you can get OpenSSL for Windows)
A certificate in PFX format inputfile.pfx (you can convert from other formats using OpenSSL too). You will of course need its password. It is useless if you do not have it, just throw that file away.

Create (encrypted) key file:

First, you need to create a key file using the following command:

	#!/bin/bash

	# https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/2295/runcommand-warning-if-voltage-temperature-throttling

	#Flag Bits
	UNDERVOLTED=0x1
	CAPPED=0x2
	THROTTLED=0x4
	HAS_UNDERVOLTED=0x10000
	HAS_CAPPED=0x20000

	#!/usr/bin/env bash
	# SoftEther VPN Server Installer Script
	# Register vultr.com with free credit https://www.vultr.com/?ref=9771340-9J
	# Create VPS
	# Tested on Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 12.0
	# Instructions:
	# 1. Save this file as softether-installer.sh
	# 2. chmod +x softether-installer.sh
	# 3. Run: ./softether-installer.sh or bash softether-installer.sh
	# 4. Initialize VPN server config: /usr/local/vpnserver/vpncmd