MS sabotages NT service in IE5 install. Not part of the OS?

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

I received this interesting note from John Eccles regarding
the impact of IE5 on his efforts to use scheduling
services.  Jamie

----- Original Message -----
From: James Love <love@cptech.org>
To: John Eccles <jeccles@bellsouth.net>
Sent: Monday, June 21, 1999 6:15 PM
Subject: Re: MS sabotages NT service in IE5 install. Not part of the OS?

John Eccles wrote:
I recently discovered something very wrong about IE5 on NT4.

NT is supposed to be in competition with Unix OS' like Linux and
Solaris. One of the great features of an *NIX OS is its ability to
schedule jobs using the cron service. This is one of the most valuable
tools of a UNIX admin to get his job done and give him time to work on
other tasks. The jobs can run under the identity of root, system,
or anyone it needs to be to get the task done. Since NT 3.x Microsoft
has included this ability via the Schedule service.

We use it extensively at our company to deploy updates and perform
functions. We run it under special user account so that it can access
network resources.

Then we "upgraded" to IE5.  Jobs started failing. Why? A little fun
bonus feature of IE5 is that it replaces Scheduler with "Task
Scheduler". And it only runs as a system service. You cannot change it
to a user account. But here's the weird part: If you look at the
Services applet in Control Panel, you see "Task Scheduler" in the
list. Schedule is gone. But if you go into the registry under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services you see that the
Schedule entry is still there... just changed. It now runs MsTask.exe
instead of the faithful AtSvc.exe. But wait.. it gets better. The two
services don't play nicely together. If you have MsTask you cannot
schedule events on any machines that have AtSvc. So... even though all
my servers have AtSvc, I can't send jobs out to them from my IE5
"enabled" computer. What the hell does this have to do with a web
browser that isn't part of the OS? Why didn't they just add a new
service entry and leave the decent scheduler in its place?

So I wondered... could I disable this from the IE5 install. I looked
in the setup dialogue when I selected "Custom". The Task Sceduler
wasn't listed to be selected or deselected. So I broke out my WinZip
to dig into the CAB files. The main install directive file is
IESETUP.CIF. Under the [BASEIE40_Win] section it has this listing:
TreatAsOne="MobilePk,BRANDING.CAB"

Branding is where OEMs and ISPs have the ability to do some cosmetics
to the install and browser settings. MobilePk? I looked further...
under [MobilePk] is has:
Dependencies=BASEIE40_Win:N,MSTASK:I
So... MobilePk is installed by default and has MSTASK listed as a
dependency...meaning it MUST be installed. You have no choice. But why
in God's name do they do this? Essentially, this gives MS the ability
to hook your OS and schedule jobs whenever it wants. This totally
sucks.

You do however have the ability to uninstall this feature manually via
the Add/Remove applet in Control Panel. Manually. So what do I do?
Deploy ten thousand machines with IE5 and then manually visit them in
4 states to uninstall the Task Scheduler?

Oooooooh... I know... I'll use the Schedule services to do it for
me...

John Eccles
Lan Admin III
Whitney National Bank
jeccles@whitneybank.com
jeccles@bellsouth.net

-- 
James Love
Consumer Project on Technology
http://www.cptech.org
love@cptech.org
202.387.8030; fax 202.234.5176