Thursday, September 01, 2016

Unblocking zip files, the permanent solution

My team recently migrated their code to Visual Studio Online (aka VSO aka VSTS), which means that any time we do our builds, we now have to download our build output through the browser as a zip file rather than copying from a file share as we formerly did when our code was built on-premise. As a consequence of this, we now stumble across a feature of Windows: automatic file blocking.

Any time we download a zip from the internet, any scripts extracted from it are automatically blocked by Windows using metadata attached to the file in the NTFS file system. This means we have to manually unblock our scripts every time we download a build and want to deploy it (But Alex, why aren't you deploying your systems automatically through a deployment manager ? Our company isn't there yet, but we're getting there). That said, there's a way to disable this feature, detailed here:

http://winaero.com/blog/disable-downloaded-files-from-being-blocked-in-windows-10/

The short of it is that there exists a group policy for disabling tracking of zone information for files downloaded from the Internet.

Start -> Run -> gpedit.msc -> Local Computer Policy -> User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Attachment Manager -> "Do not preserve zone information in file attachments" : Enabled.

Done.

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