Winrm throws 401 if user is not Administrator actual

I actually think this also points to a larger issue that chef-client should always be run under the Administrator account on newer windows (Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008)

It appears UAC causes all kinds of fun and a user in the local admin group is not the same as the Administrator account:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservergen/thread/a1a58463-6cb9-46f5-9a98-25cfec33d222/

I see two options:

• find a way to disable UAC completely or for users in the admin group
• chef-client must be run as Administrator. The Administrator account must also have a password enabled. This means chef-client must be set to run as a service (that runs as Administrator). You can also use runas to launch a new shell with elevated privileges:

C:\Users\Seth Chisamore>runas /user:Administrator cmd
    Enter the password for Administrator:

This is another bug that I believe will be resoled by merging the pull related to KNIFE_WINDOWS-17.

Even if we can authenticate using HOST\Administrator to ensure that we're using the local administrator account rather than a domain account that is the local administrators group directly or via domain admins, this is going to be a problem in the future for larger environments that only use the local administrator account for emergency access to the system locally such as safe mode recovery.

Many environments don't track the local administrator account password or they get lost over time. We need to resolve this by finding a way to run chef against a system in a domain, either by fixing Chef or finding a UAC workaround. Additionally I wonder how this affects running Chef as a service under NetworkService, or another account.

I am not sure that this is an issue with UAC. The original report never indicated that there was an issue running a process.

Now recently I have been doing a lot of dev on the knife plugin and can attest that I am able to login with both a local account (that is not Administrator) that is an admin and (with my latest changes) an account that is on the domain. The machines that I am running this on do not have UAC enabled (but maybe worth testing). If I re-read this bug it seems that they user is saying that they cannot authenticate as any user but administrator. I cannot repro this behavior. I am able to run commands with both my domain and local creds.

@Bryan - Can you repro?

Here is the branch that I am using... https://github.com/pmorton/knife-windows/tree/integration

Paul