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From: Gmane User <fma AT doe DOT carleton DOT ca>
Subject:  Re: A FAQ regarding defrag and permissions of nonadmin files?
Date:  Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:43:22 -0400
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Brian Dessent wrote:
> Gmane User wrote:
>> The defragger I used was JkDefrag.  And there was the explanation,
>> right in the online documentation.  The files to be defragged need
>> to be accessible by admin.  I never suspected that something as
>> system-wide as defragging would be dependent on a specific account.
>> Setting all files to go+rwx allows all the files to defrag.
>>
>> This arrangement clashes directly with the unix practice of having
>> all nonadmin user file permissions default to u+rw,go-rwx.  A unix
>> user (not necessarily an admin, as I've never been) who wanders
>> into the weird and wonderful world of Windows would think he/she
>> found salvation in cygwin (and would mostly be right).  He/she
>> (let's just say "It") would innocently and obliviously bring its
>> Unix ways with it, and never be able to defrag.  I am baffled by
>> why this caveat isn't documented in any defrag or cygwin
>> posting/page that I've come across.
>
> This is just patently false.  While it may be true that a defrag
> program that runs in userspace needs access to a file to defrag it,
> that does not in any mean that some special "admin" user needs
> access to it.  And besides, most defraggers install as a service
> anyway, so they run as the system.
>
>     <...snip quite illustrative example for brevity...>
>
> The file has been defragmented and there was no need for any chmod
> go+rwx.
>
> For the record I took a look at JkDefrag's source at some point in
> the past and it made me shudder how badly coded it was.  I suggest
> UltraDefrag which is open source and free and it installs a native
> driver to do the defragmentation so there is none of this worrying
> about who owns a file or what ACLs it has.  Since it has a native
> interface it can even run at bootup before files such as
> pagefile.sys are locked.

I'm defragging the whole disk, so I need the defragger to be able to
access all files from whatever account it runs under.

Bear with me if I mention something inaccurate, as I've just started
reading up on the concepts today.  Corrections are welcome.

About defragging as a service, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120929
says that the System account has no more permissions than an admin
account.

About defragging on boot-up, JkDefrag does this too, but still needs
an account to run under.  Is it possible for a defrag (or a process)
to run not under any account?  That is, does Ultra Defragmenter
actually do this?  Ultra Defragmenter would have been my first choice,
except that I ran into this caveat:
http://groups.google.ca/group/alt.comp.freeware/browse_frm/thread/377f0ea5602cc584/855cc4e01f835029.
I described in my original post the barriers to ghosting in my
obsolete system, so I'm reticent to experiment with developmental
defraggers until they built up a bit of a track record.  This decision
has more to do with safety than how well the algorithm may be coded
up.


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