ALR

Thanks for all the responses guys. We found that the exe was a repackaged exe with a different hash so our GPO blocking the file didn't pick it up. We have added the new exe hash now. Yes you have to give them credit. Some of them are very enterprising little gifts from God! We'll just have to keep our eyes on what they are bringing in.... Cheers chaps! Al

When we look into the Powerpoint file, the exe file location point to the temporary AppData on the local profile of one of our student users. The location just says C:\Users\09Username\AppData\Local\Temp\Filename.exe but the file does not exist on the PC I am testing on so it must be getting the source from the local profile of another PC somewhere on the network. The thing I do not understand is all our Student accounts have mandatory profiles.

Hi All, We are being plagued at the moment with students playing Minecraft in lessons. We have blocked the .exe from running and have denied any student saving a .exe on their home folders. The little darlings are now embedding the .exe into a Powerpoint presentation then running it from there and it is working. Does anyone know how to block .exes running from within Powerpoint? I've done a Google around and have searched forums but have found nothing that would suit. We are running Windows 7 32-bit on clients, Office 2010 and our domain is Server 2008 R2. Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Al

Before WHD was sold to SolarWinds, you could use the "lite" version (for one techie) for free. If you had more than one member of IT Support staff then you had to purchase additional licences. SolarWinds bought it really recently and changed the format of the licences, so no more freebies...

Do you have another PC with only the standard XP fonts installed? Just copy them from there. Failing that the list of XP fonts is here: Standard installed windows XP fonts Cheers, Al

We use WebHelpDesk, the most important feature for us was end user ease of use, and this helpdesk is VERY easy to use but powerful at the same time. Help Desk Software by Web Help Desk Cheers, Al

I would strongly recommend that you DON'T install Exchange on a DC as you could have limitless complications. I once looked after a school with this set up (Exchange 2003 running on a Server 2003 DC) and the issues we faced included 20+ minute log on times at random moments through the day. This was due to the Exchange Mailbox Store service taking over 80% of system resources and dragging everything else on the server down to a crawl. If you can, keep your Primary DC being just a primary DC and your Exchange box being nothing but an Exchange box. You'll definitely have less headaches Cheers, Al

On your DC, open MMC and add ADSI Edit into the console. ADSI Edit is just another way of looking at active directory. Once ADSI edit is open, you should see the top of the AD tree (something like "Domain [servername.domain.ext.ext]) if you expand the level you'll see a folder icon with your domain name looking like [DC=domainname, DC=forestname,DC=uk]. When you expand again you should see a directory similar to AD but with "OU=" in front of each OU name. Find the OU where your user is, then right click the user (something like "CN=testaccount") and go to properties. In the window will be all the attributes that your user object has (basically all the info displayed in the tabs in ADUC). I cannot remember what the groups attributes are called, but look down the list looking for your security group names. Hopefully one of them in there will be the group that your test account was taken out of. Remove it from in there then delete the local profile on the PC, reboot PC and try the mappings again. I can have a poke a writing a "How To" with screenshots if needed but that will take a bit longer. Don't want to teach you how to suck eggs though! :0) Cheers, Al

What type of script maps the drives? Batch file? KIX script? I had something similar on Server 2003 awhile back. I went into ADSI edit on the server and checked the groups the affected account was in and it WAS a member of one of the groups which ADUC was not showing! Cheers, Al

Yes you have to delete the Desktop.ini to return the home folder name to the username, but using the File Screen prevents the user from saving another desktop.ini the next time they log off. The solution to get rid of the "MY Documents" folder name is delete the desktop.ini then apply the file screen to stop it coming back... The physical folder name in the NTFS file structure will stay the same (if you navigate to the folder in Command prompt the name will still be the username), the dekstop.ini masks it to call it "My Documents", but your home folder shares should still work if set up properly. If the share stops working it is more likely something in the GPO, the share or permissions than the desktop.ini oddity. Cheers, Al

Only thing to note about with having one server as a VM host is that if that server fails, you lose all the VMs on it. Everything is moving Virtual nowadays (my domain is now fully VMWare) so it is a sound way of moving forward... Cheers, Al

Alright, firstly it is always best to have your Primary DC doing nothing but being a Domain Controller. That way if you have any Domain issues, you know there is going to be no other application/service interfering with your DC. Also, us IT guys in Schools have to support hundreds of log-ons everyday as students change lessons etc, so our DCs always have a lot of work to do! Second, you cannot raise the functional level of the domain whilst you have Server 2000 DCs still running. Demoting Server 2000 DCs can be a right pain the ass too! You really are going to have to purchase a new server to be your Primary DC. With regards to Exchange, I'll need to do some further digging, but Exchange is heavily integrated into AD. If you raise your domain level with Server 2000 DCs still online, then I would expect Exchange to throw a fit. I also recommend you do not run Sharepoint and SQL Services on the same server unless it has a lot of RAM/Processor power. One way of getting your level raised: Buy a new server, install with Server 2003 and DC Promo it. Transfer all FSMOs to it. Move File/Printer services from back-up DC to Sharepoint server, re-install old backup-DC with server 2003, DCPromo it. Make sure all FSMOs/DNS/DHCP etc is off old Primary DC. Turn off old Primary DC and check all runs. Re-install old Primary DC with Server 2003 and transfer Exchange 2003 to it. (to eradicate Server 2000) Raise domain level to server 2003. Re-install old Server 2000 box which ran Exchange with Server 2003, then transfer Sharepoint or File/Print services to it. That is one hell of a lot of messing around (and assuming you have the licenses), and I would rather do it with smaller steps than that, but that is one way of raising your Domain level... Cheers, Al

Is there any further information in Event Viewer with regards to IIS? It may give further information about what is crashing/causing the crash... Cheers, Al

Hi jfrey, Quite a complex question you have there. Can I ask a few questions first so I can best understand your set up and requirements? 1. Are your current DCs Windows Server 2000? 2. When you say can the existing 2003 servers be used as a DC do you mean leaving them installed as is and doing a DCPromo on it? 3. What age are your physical servers? 4. When you say to keep the demoted Server 2000 servers, do you mean not re-installing them? 5. Do you have licencing restrictions, or is there money in the pot? I'm happy to give you my advice with regards to your questions, but it is only advice based on my past experiences and knowledge and not an experts advice! Cheers, Al

There is a fix for the home folders being renamed to "My Documents". We had this problem and fixed it by stopping users from saving the desktop.ini files in their home area. This might be totally unrelated but I saw the image attached to your post and thought it may help. If you want directions on applying the file screen, let me know and I'll post it... Cheers, Al

We have found the resolution for this ourselves. It was a problem within PCounter, our print control software. We removed the printer from PCounter and all works as normal. We are now going to look into the problem with PCounter! Many Thanks, Al

Hi, I was wondering if anyone out there has come across this really strange problem with Windows 7 32bit and Office 2010. We have set up a HP LJ400 on our Server 2008 print server which works fine except when trying to print a Word 2010 document with less than 4 lines of text. We have also set the printer up locally using USB but have the same problem. If we open a document with more than 4 lines of text, or create a new document and type more that 4 lines of text, the document prints. If we simply write "Testing 123" and print, the document shows up on the print queue for a split second but does not print out. This is evident both when installed directly on the PC via USB, or installed from the print server. We have tried changing the settings from using the Print Spooler to printing directly to printer, but there is no change. We have also tried every print driver out there for the printer, but again there is no change. Has anyone else come across this problem? We are currently attempting a re-install of Office and will post results in case anyone else comes across this issue. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Kind Regards, Al

Hi Guys, I am posting here as a last resort as I am at my wits end. We have been unable to download our Free School Meals data from our LA so far this Academic Year because our uplink to the LA's broadband consortium was terminated - we have gone elsewhere - and the download client for the FSM data no longer functions. The support staff at the LA tell me the client will NOT work with any other broadband connection. I have, therefore, asked for an alternative. The two presented were a GCSx address or having the details posted. I am struggling to get anyone to tell me "To get a GCSx address you need to..." and I have called several communications companies and they have all gone "a what address?". I've got our catering staff/student services staff screaming at me that they have no FSM data and the Local Authority has adopted the attitude of "Tough! You terminated the connection" (they will happily reconnect us for over £5k p.a. of course even though we would only use the connection for FSM) My questions are: 1) Does anyone know whose responsibility it is for said Free School Meals data being delivered? Is it our responsibility as a School to ensure the data is delivered or is the Local Authorities responsibility to make sure we receive said data? 2) I know what GCSx is but does anyone know how I go about getting a connection/meeting the CoCo standards? Any light being shed upon this dark and dingy subject would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, ALR I am now going home to Google how to tie a noose....

It's been a while since I updated this thread but I'm happy to say we have found the cause at long last!! The issue was the permissions on the home folder share. All our staff members home folders were being redirected to \\server\users$\staff, but all our staff accounts had Full Control of both the Users$ share and the staff share. I removed these permissions, then renamed their home folder to "username.old", in the user account settings in AD I changed the home folder setting to "%username%", thus allowing Server 2003 to create the home folder itself rather than manually creating it (as the ICT staff here were doing) and, after getting the user to log on and re-create the home folder and then moving all the data across, this seems to have solved the problem. If Server 2003 creates the home folder itself, it doesn't replace it at logon as it was doing. This gave the impression that the home folders were emptying themselves when, in actual fact, Server 2003 was replacing them with new empty ones. Removal of the permissions to the root share and setting the home folder up correctly using %username% has rectified the problem! Wanted to update in case anyone else had this problem as I have never seen this before... Many Thanks, Al

You don't need the catalog files to restore the data. All the catalogs do is allow the back-up program to search the tape faster for the data you are looking to restore. If you open NT BackUp on another server, it will simply have to read all the tape to restore it. Do you get any specific error messages? Cheers, Al

Can you be a bit more specific? What is your experience? Please PM if you don't want to post.... Cheers, Al

Yes that could be useful if you don't mind! Thanking you! Al

Hi, I have been searching through threads but couldn't find anything recent on CSE Education Systems. Does anyone have any recent experiences with them (i.e. the last 12 months)? We are considering our options for going fully Virtual with all our servers (8) Many Thanks in advance... Al

I have already ordered a NAS box and I am backing up to this being as the tape backups are complete screwed. This was one of the first things I did when I took role. The previous Manager also decided not to set folder size limits so, currently, the staff are using over 2TB of space and the students almost 1TB, so backing up is a nightmare, even with a 16 tape Quantum (which doesn't work proerly anyway). Secondly, there are only two nodes in the Cluster, DC02 and DC03 and in theory DC02 should carry on regardless if I pulled the plug on DC03 but "the powers that be" will not allow me to take DC03 offline because one of the "IT Consultants" from higher up said data may get corrupted. My experience and certifications don't seem to count for nothing by the sounds of it... This is why I'm trying to find a way to stop users authenticating with DC03, hence stop the Home Folder problem, but keep the server online until said powers that be allow me to trash the damn thing and start again. I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.....

Cannot demote it, it is a Cluster node, there is too much risk of losing data, especially being as the previous guy messed up the Back-ups and no back-ups have been taken for about 4 months!