It has been a year and a half since we released the “hack” to make WSS and MOSS run on Vista. I think it is time to tell the story of how we made this happen.
I have seen a few bloggers posting different ideas on how it was done. The most popular theory seems to be that it is a “registry hack”. |
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| WSSOnVista is based on API interception or API hooking. It was an article in MSDN magazine by the well known Matt Pietrek that became the foundation of the hooking API. |
| Using API interception we should be able to fool the installer that it is running on a server OS, just pick your choice of what to return to a call to GetVersionEx. This way we “fooled” the installer to think it was running on a server OS. Because IIS7 running on Vista SP1 and Windows 2008 is so similar, we and (you) could get away with it ;) |
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| How could we hook the API? |
| By having the SetupLauncher.exe staring the WSS/MOSS setup we could use “CreateRemoteThread” (Jeffrey Richter) to inject our dll into the process space and thus intercept all API calls. |
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| The most important thing to tell you is that we have NOT made ANY changes to WSS or MOSS to run on Vista, the “only” thing we did was fooling the setup that it was actually running on Win2003/Win2k8. |
Thanks |
Posted
Oct 16 2009, 12:39 AM
by
Jonas Nilsson
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