link470

We do have two DC's. The policy lies in both DC's. If I'm in Group Policy Management and select at the top of the domain to switch domain controllers and go to my second one, the policies listed are identical.

Alright guys, this ones....fun. I've got a GPO in the schools domain that I use to restrict the student interface. You know, the usual. Restrict taskbar movement, Control Panel applets that appear, what appears in the My Network Places and even removing My Network Places all together. The policy worked great before. It restricted users on every point it was supposed to. However, I then got the great idea to try editing the policy and adding Software Restriction. Long story short, users couldn't open any programs for 15 minutes lol. So I quickly withdrew that policy and pulled the Software Restriction. However, the entire policy didn't work now and didn't apply. So I thought to myself "uhhhhhhh I should have restricted software in a seperate policy". However I wasn't thinking on that level at first and thought I should just add it and see what happens. So anyways, that's all gone now and I ended up taking that policy, backing it up, and creating a brand new policy that restricts the user interface. All under the "User" part of the policy and applied to the Students OU that contains 4 OU's, 9, 10, 11, and 12 for each grade in the high school. Those OU's of course contain the students in those grades. So, that's all done. I reapplied the policy at the Students OU level, and tried again, remembering that I had the policy working for 4 or 5 months before I had tried the software restriction policy. But now, that software restriction policy is completely gone. So after the UI restrictions are in place I head off to a student machine and try logging in as a student. I logged into my test student account, and to my surprise, none of the policies for UI were layed down. I opened event viewer [since I could, no restrictions in place] and looked for any policy errors. There were none. I then opened Run>CMD [since I could, no restrictions in place], and ran gpresult. Nowhere in here could I see the new policy I created, I usually see one called "Set User Interface", the name of the policy. However, there was nothing. So I run gpupdate, and log out, and back in. Nothing. I run gpupdate /force, and log out, and back in. Nothing. I check gpresult again for filtering or "not applied because..." messages, nothing. I couldn't see the name of the policy anywhere in any of the commands, and the UI is completely accessable. So I go back to the server. I'm mind boggled. I go into Group Policy Management and I attempt to do the Group Policy Modelling Wizard to see what's applied for that OU. I right click on the Student OU and start the modelling wizard. I click the different grade OU's before and double check the inheritance and make sure that yes, the policy is being pushed down and inherited. It is. So I continue the policy modelling, and run it as if I was a student to see what's applied. Low and behold, it applies perfectly and lists as applied. However no client machines are picking up the policy. If that wasn't enough, I had one other policy that's Set Internet Explorer Settings for Students, and that used to work perfectly. I never edited that policy, but it randomly stopped applying as well. Yet, shows as applied in the modelling wizard with no issues. There's 6 policies in total for users, about 4 for computers that are applied when a student logs in. They work perfectly. The ONLY other change I've made is to the GPO's that apply the correct homepage based on computer location. I use the group policy loopback processing to apply the user setting to a computer setting and put the school home page GPO's in each computer OU that contains a student computer, and the library home page GPO in the library computers OU. It was never working, so I recently set the status to "Replace" instead of "Merge" in group policy loopback processing setting on those two home page GPO's. The home pages now work, but I also noticed now that the same policies, if I run gpresult on a student computer, are shown under both computer AND user settings. I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the replace setting, I thought loopback processing would apply to JUST that policy, but maybe to all? I mean, I made these changes two days apart from each other. The policy processing, and then 2 days later, adding the software restriction to the student OU. Maybe this isn't caused by software restriction at all? Maybe it's something to do with those loopback processing settings? Still, it doesn't explain why the Set User Interface and Set Internet Explorer Settings for Students policies just stop working and aren't applied where all server settings and tests show they are, and all client computers don't have a clue what the policy is anymore. It worked as of a week ago. But the software restriction issues are what triggered me to find this issue. Either way I need to get this policy back up as soon as I can as it's one of the more powerful student restriction plans I have in place. Such a simple policy yet so powerful, and it just won't apply anymore. Thank you all for reading this far. I really really appreciate your time taken to read this and look forward to a reply.

I'm just waitin till the 29th

I'm over in Canada and am doing Network Administration and Security as well as desktop support for high schools here in the school district. I started about a year ago and am currently being paid about $24,000 Canadian. I know the feeling of being underpaid forsure. I'm the only IT guy here in the building and they call the job description "Computer Lab Technician" but I don't think they have a clue what it means to do that half the time. They think I fix or replace a mouse or refill ink sometimes. But very rarely do any of them actually know how much work we do. I'm not on salary. I'm doing the job of a Network Engineer [as I'm certified for], Network Administrator, Network Security Analyst [which I specialize in], Programmer, Help Desk, and yes, the computer lab technician. I'm paid $21 CAD an hour. At the same time, I have clients on the side, and I completely agree with Micheal on what he said here: "Working in education is a great place to learn your trade, develop your skills and work with other network managers with years of experience." It's absolutely true, however I have nobody above me. I design and make the decisions as well. Sure, I pass it by Administration of the school so they know how it affects them and how it affects the budget. But really they just want everything to work, and that's the one thing about IT. They have NO IDEA how much work we do to make everyone happy and streamline things. I came here after a previous tech had no security experience etc., had staff information accessible by students, etc., and it's not pretty. But did they like him? Absolutely, they loved him. Again, they have no idea. Now here's the thing. I got this job last June, I was 19. I'm 20 now. Being 19 and graduated from high school and University I was already very happy to be making $24,000 a year and with clients about $32000 a year Canadian. That's more than I'd ever dreamed of where I'd be right now. I think the best part about working in Education is that it's not as strict as some places may be [i assume, I don't know your exact working conditions], it's often a very friendly environment, and best of all, where I'm at? I have 6 servers, multiple high end switches and 250 client machines here in this building alone that I have complete control over how I can shape and design the network. The experience of having all this stuff at the tips of my fingers is awsome, I can do whatever I want here and the decision making is mine. That's something you may not get down the road if you switch jobs and are under the supervision of someone higher than you. However, with the experience gained here, we can immediately have the chance to move into a higher position because we already have the leadership experience, the networking experience in ALL aspects, not just the help desk, and gains us quite the resume for the future. The most important thing, am I happy? Absolutely. I get to hang out with my friends and then come here to work and have complete control over an entire schools network with a growing setup and provide customer service to very friendly people, and everything we learn here, appleis to everything else whether it's my home setup, a clients setup, or just adding it to the general knowledgebase in your head. Dispite the school district just next to our area of the city is offering me nearly double, I want to finish what I started here at this school, and make this place truly own before I go anywhere. It's not work to me. It's a project.

That software looks really good. However is there a way to make it a little bit more stealthy and installed hidden? I'm just wondering since it has a system tray icon for the program that it may be tampered with by some users. Is there a way to hide it completely and not give off those balloon message alerts when an event occurs such as someone tried to remote access your computer but wasn't authenticated correctly? I'd like for this to be a silent monitoring solution if possible and allow me to remote access teacher computers to help them if they have a problem as well. Also, hows the toll on bandwidth?

Hey everyone. I've got 2 Windows XP machines here on my home network, both running Windows XP Pro. I'm actually getting them ready for a friend of mine. She's going to use a new machine I built for her as her main machine, and her old system I'm turning into a shared media server. So what I've done so far, is got her old computer, downloaded and installed Windows Media Player 11, transfered all her songs to her My Music folder, went to her Monitored Folders list in Windows Media Player 11 and confirmed My Music as a location, and clicked ok to re-search that folder and add all of her songs. Worked perfectly as it should. Now the issue. I turn on Windows Media Sharing, and set the sharing to Music and Videos, unchecked pictures, and set all star ratings, and all content ratings to be shown. However, in the "Share my media to:" field, there is no computers or devices. On my network here, there is my main machine, her new computer, and her old computer I'm sharing the media off of. My machine and her new machine can't see her computer in the left panel in Windows Media Player 11, and her old computer [shared Media Computer] can't see my computer or her new computer in the "Share my media to:" list. Therefore I have nothing to "Allow" or "Deny" or "Configure". When I transfer her two computers to her house and wire them in, I'd like for the media server to be able to share Windows Media to her new computers Windows Media Player, the downstairs computers Windows Media Player 11 on XP Professional, and the Xbox 360 downstairs. My roommate next to me [on another IP address] uses his PC and shares media to his Xbox 360. That works flawlessly. Please let me know if I've missed something incredibly obvious, or if there's no way to share Windows Media Player 11 content to another Windows Media Player 11 library on the same network. Thanks! ------------------------- ********EDIT******** ------------------------- Alright so I found a solution that works for now. I just added the folders on the "server" computer as shared and hidden with a $. MyMusic$, MyPictures$, MyVideos$ and then added write and modify permissions so people could add songs and media to the library in the house. I then set the Monitor Folders on any "client" media players to monitor those hidden shares. Works perfectly. It found all the media files on the server computer.

Thanks for everyones replies so far. Keep in mind this is not going to multiple websites on ONE server, but on TWO or THREE dedicated web servers under one IP address, all to use port 80 if possible. I'm currently using the D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N router, and can of course only forward port 80 to ONE internal IP. So yes, host headers would work if I had either multiple IP's and forwarded to one box, OR if I had multiple websites under one IP, and as I explained before, I currently AM using host headers to host the 3 websites that are on that SINGLE server acting as both Web and MySQL Server. But, I'd like to have a dedicated server for a few of my other websites. So I'd need a front end. Also, any comments so far about hosting my own mail server and if an Internal DNS solution would be best?

[ The following is a direct copy/paste of my post at TechRepublic ] How do I host all these Sites and Services under 1 IP Address? Here's the deal. I started out when I was little making websites on a free webbased setup online. Similar to freewebs. I used Homestead. They offered more. Then as I grew up I became a Network Administrator as I am now. I host the websites out of my own house. I had one web server and I hosted files on it for a website I still had at homestead. Eventually, I got a second server, set port 80 to forward to that, and installed Server 2003 and IIS on that server and bought a domain name from Godaddy.com, configured an A record to my home IP address, and I was good to go. I now have 3 websites on that server. It's also the Database server for those websites which require dynamic content. The domains for all of them are from 2 different registrars, but I used the DNS tool in both to configure an A record to my home address. From there, to differentiate the difference between the 3 web addresses on the same server, I configure Host Headers within IIS. Now, what I'd like to do, and the purpose for typing up this question, is to host websites on different servers, as well as host a mail server. I've been told hosting my own DNS server is the way to go. I'd like to have say, one website hosted on one dedicated server, and another few websites hosted on another server, but with a router on a home cable line I can't forward port 80 to two different machines. Do I need to forward it to an internal DNS server that acts as a proxy or something? Please do correct me if I'm wrong. I don't want to purchase another IP, I know I CAN, but that's not the point. The point is I really want to learn how to do this. The other thing I'd like to do, is host a mail server. I have licences for a mail server at the moment [Kerio Mail Server 6] and would like to use it as an SMTP and POP server. For example, one of my websites has forums and the forums need to know a valid SMTP server to send out "mass emails" and newsletters [i use PHPBB]. I'd like to configure it so not only it can send emails, but I can also make mailboxes for admin members. Through GoDaddy, I can purchase extra email addresses through THEIR mail system, but I'd like to have my own. Again, I've talked with people who use Kerio already and they say the best way to do this is to host your own in house DNS server and make MX records for your internal server. If anyone has any information on how I can do this, any websites, or would take the time to explain how I can do it, please do let me know. I'll be more than happy to supply more information if need be as well or if I wasn't clear. Thank you so much in advance for taking the time to read my question. Much appreciated.

Image recovery drive is 10GB or so, and the main partition is 103GB [out of 120]

I totally hear ya. Having only just turned 20 and Administrating the school district network people are wondering about certain changes and if they can get certain things like "oh wow do you think vistas a good move? but its very pretty" and the other half "vista sucks" and they've never touched the operating system, they just hop on the vista sucks bandwagon and have never tried it. Me personally? Sure, it's not a complete operating system, but I'm more than happy to have an XP network, I personally can't wait for the release of XP SP3, then I'll reimage all the machines with SP3 and hopefully be set for a long time. XP is great, no reason for me to switch yet. Why? Just as you guys pointed out, it WORKS. The glitches are worked out, it works well with policies, it's not complicated, everyone and their dog know how to use it, let alone their fish [my fish are using BSD at home but hey give them a break ok? they live with a network security analyst], and the main thing, it will run, sure, not GREAT, but it will run, on a 300MHz PC with 128MB of ram if need be. Vista? Good game. Not gonna happen. So if we have a school here with only 900MHz machines in the district cause that's all they can afford, we can build a nice setup of XP machines that will function great on them. Bump the ram to 256? You're set, works great as a Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word machine. There's simply no reason for me to switch yet. I'm happy where I am. XP is working, secure, patched, will run on legacy hardware, and people know it.

I've got a Vista Business laptop I'm working on speeding up for a friend of mine. She downloads music [not too much, a good 8GB worth in total], and shes got a 103GB HD. It's actually 120 but you all know how formatting works out and hidden partitions for recovery. It's an IBM Lenovo. However, in Computer, it shows the drive as about 16GB free of 103GB. She has pretty much no programs on there, and has a few songs. It's not a virus, and I've ran programs like WinDirStat to find the hidden files etc. on her system and where larger files may be hiding. WinDirStat with all system files, and hidden files shown, say her drive contains 34GB worth of data. In theory, she should have around 60GB free. I don't have a clue where that is. I ran other software to find files on there, and heck, even just enabled "show hidden files and folders" and "show system files" and control+all properties on everything in her drive, those all equal 34GB as well. I ran a chkdsk on her file system to get her indexes straight, and still shows up as 34GB, but 16GB free. Notes: -Hibernation is turned on and is 3.3GB in size [included in the total 34GB] -Pagefile is the same size and is also included in the 34GB total -Machine has a 2.00GHz dual core Intel Centrino based processor, and has 3GB of RAM -This morning when I checked [after working on it last night and discovering 16GB free], there was magically 26GB free. An extra 10GB gained from who knows where. I never touched the machine during the night, and it never went to sleep or hibernated. Anyone face this problem or know a solution? Thanks!

The first 2 paragraphs here at a direct copy paste from a previous post, but I shortened it to what we're actually having problems with now and took out the parts that weren't really important anymore. Hopefully since the Windows forum gets some more attention we'll be able to figure this out So the network I run has a 10.0.0.1 subnet and a 10.0.1.1 subnet. Within the past few weeks I've noticed that more and more machines are appearing with Limited or No Connectivity. I went to my DHCP server and discovered there were a few machines coming up with BAD_ADDRESS which usually means something else is assigning them a DHCP lease or the machine is static and DHCP is trying to hand out that IP to someone. Our current setup is that one of our servers has the DHCP server running on it, and a second DHCP server runs the other subnet and router. This server is a pain. It's really a pain. It was also our ISA server and I ditched ISA because there were way too many ways to get around it. I ended up purchasing a Barracuda Web Filter 310 and nobody can get by that so far. So I'm very happy with it. But the server still has to be there because it's running our router service. Besides from this, our DNS service shows many different duplicate addresses. So it might show 10.0.0.1 and 5 or 6 different computers with a PTR record to that same IP. I'm having troubles pinging some new machines etc. What's worse is that many of the entries there, are old computer names that no longer exist in Active Directory. But scavenging doesn't delete them. A manual scavenge won't delete them. I'm wondering if I should just go ahead and manually delete every entry in DNS and DHCP and repopulate the fields after all the students and staff are out for the day and the machines are powered off and just let the machines power on the next day and fetch a new IP address. Before anyone asks, yes, the DHCP server is set to automatically update pointer records in DNS AND delete stale records [which it doesn't seem to be doing]. If anyone has any information on why this happened or how I can possibly make it cleaner, please do let me know. Thanks! :D:D

So the network I run has a 10.0.0.1 subnet and a 10.0.1.1 subnet. Within the past few weeks I've noticed that more and more machines are appearing with Limited or No Connectivity. I went to my DHCP server and discovered there were a few machines coming up with BAD_ADDRESS which usually means something else is assigning them a DHCP lease or the machine is static and DHCP is trying to hand out that IP to someone. Our current setup is that one of our servers has the DHCP server running on it, and a second DHCP server runs the other subnet and router. This server is a pain. It's really a pain. It was also our ISA server and I ditched ISA because there were way too many ways to get around it. I ended up purchasing a Web Filter 310 and nobody can get by that so far. So I'm very happy with it. But the server still has to be there because it's running our router service and we have a Netmaster Blade-GG firewall inside of it. One of the hardest cards to make work for me. But I'm wondering if I'd be able to just transfer that DHCP subnet to another system or add another subnet. Also, I should probably have static IP address ranges for printers and servers. As of now, the static IP's are kind of everywhere with random reservations. It's a very confusing setup I've walked into. I wish I could remote access into our router/DHCP Windows Server 2003 box and take some screenshots, but I can't remote into it because it refuses to let me access it remotely. Oh ya, and it's also the same box as the main office lady uses to broadcast powerpoint on our TV's around the school [yes, she remote accesses our gateway]. I would have personally chosen a different computer to do this on but I wasn't here. Anyways, ya. Just curious at some of your DHCP set ups and how you manage IP addresses out there. I've been having more and more people come to me once in awhile saying "my computer can't connect to the internet" and I go there only to find out theres limited or no connectivity. What's worse, is I'm wondering if that's been happening to some of the network printers too. Some people can't print to certain printers at the moment. Thanks! EDIT: Ended up being a permissions issue and DHCP had the wrong Domain Administrator password.

AWSOME. *adds to basket* These are all great ideas. Thanks everyone! I really like the idea of the spray on RRR stuff. Especially since it smells like lemons. One of my previous techs that tought me a couple years ago when I was in high school used something called Rubber Renue. He said it was extremely toxic, and to have an alternative that works and smells like lemons? I'm down. I'll check out that replacement store too.

So as was pointed out in Best Inkjet Printer for classrooms - EduGeek.net Forums , it seems like many staff like to have their own printers. I particularely liked the post about staff refusing to print to the printer nearby even though it's "urgent". So true. We've got staff here that complain that their personal printer is down, and they have a fully functional business class colour laser/photocopier right next to their desk. Oh...oh wait. No. They have 4 next to their desks. They're right next to the networked copy room. Because of this, we have many printers with rollers around the school that pick up paper. Some of them lasers, like the Dell 1700 laser printers that haven't been much good at all at feeding paper, and a few personal inkjet machines. What I'm wondering, is the machine will claim either that it has a paper jam, or that it's out of paper, when really, the paper is all loaded in, and there's nothing wrong. When I look closer, I can see the roller go down onto the paper and start rotating, and the roller doesn't do squat. It just sits there and rotates. There's no way to make it pick up paper. My question is, is the printer broken at that time? Or can you either A, do something to the roller to make it pick up paper again, or B, replace the roller? I've been looking around online and I can't find much information on this. I just found a ton of people complaining about the Dell 1700 as well with problems pulling paper into the system. Thanks!

Alright, so I'm running the network for a school [duh, it's why we're here ] but I'm wondering about encryption. I'm only 20, and back when I was in high school before University, our board office got broken into and they went for the IT department and took a ton of hard drives and backup tapes. All of which were encrypted. As Network Administrator in the school district now, I want to make sure the same thing doesn't happen here at this high school. I love TrueCrypt, everything I've ever heard about that program completely owns. However I'm curious as to how it does with encrypting a full hard drive, and what would prevent an attacker from just booting that hard drive up. Does TrueCrypt load before the OS loads? How does that work in your experience? Basically I just want to have all our servers encrypted, so in the event of someone getting a hold of them, they wouldn't be able to login of course from a secure windows password, but what would prevent them from stealing the drive and reading it at home? If there's an encryption method that you guys use for encrypting the entire server, please do share! Also any client encryption would be great, but not as needed since all files are saved to the server and not locally. I found PGP online, they look like an excellent company. But we're running out of money here in the IT budget for this year since a lot of things needed to be changed. Truecrypt attracts me because it's open source, but PGP attracts me because of how easy and managable it looks. However at a little over 100 bucks per machine [it looks like, unless I'm reading wrong] it could get very pricey. Thanks for any advice!

Thank you very much! I will try this tomorrow in my spare time... [LOL spare time...what's that ] Anyone else have any ideas?

This is going to sound awful as a network engineer, but what is WebDav? [i'm really tired, lol] I googled it but at first glance it looks more like a technology than an individual program. Is there an individual program you use?

Hey everyone. Just had a question about remote access to the home drive for staff. As we have now, there's a link on our school website, that directs to the H drives on the server. Just using a port number, and mapping that port number in IIS to a Staff Shares website with the home directory of the root of the staff folder. The staff then enter in their username and password for the network because the site is using Integrated Windows Authentication. From there, they are shown a normal file directory page with all the teacher folders. They simply click theirs, and voila. They have access. Since they don't have access to the others through the ACL for each staff folder, they can't enter it. So they can only choose to click on their own folder. Here's the page: http://www.parkland.sd63.bc.ca/Staff/ . It's the top link there, and it will ask for Windows Authentication right away. What I'd like to do, is have a nicer layout. Sure, you can "read" what's in your H drive, but what about download a document, work on it, and upload it as well? Like, an online storage base. I found this: http://pfn.sourceforge.net/index.php?opc=4&lg=ing but I'm not sure if it will allow me to do what I want. If I'd be able to have that authenticate with Windows, and show the correct user folder. Has anyone had any experience doing anything like this? Adding a nicer remote file layout? Maybe via FTP instead of doing it through web? Thanks!

I've recently taken down our schools proxy server. We had 2 gateways. One gateway was going into our proxy server, and out to the internet. The other gateway, was going into our firewall, and out to the internet. Strange setup, but that's how they had it. We have 2 IP's, one on the otherside of the firewall, and one on the otherside of our proxy server. The students went through the proxy, and the staff went through the main default gateway. Here's the problem. I disabled the proxy service on the ISA 2000 server that always gave us troubles and never actually did a good job of blocking anything. I purchased a Barracuda Web Filter [the 310 model] and it's working flawlessly. The only issue is that the proxy server was now their friend, as students would try to access the internet through the proxy and have their sites they used to access back. That's why I disabled the proxy service. So that gateway no longer goes anywhere. So the teachers are still being set at the main gateway through the ipconfig /setclassid * proxy command in their login batch file. However the student accounts dont have the permissions to write to the registry to make that entry. I'm not sure if this is something I need to set before hand on all the images under the network card and add it to the default gateways list, or if there's an easy fix like setting it at the domain level or having the dhcp server configure it automatically. Thanks!

Hey everyone. I'm just wondering about my home network here. I run 6 servers at home and more than half of them run services outside the network. I use the D-Link DIR-655 router as mentioned in the subject. I'm curious, I've always used Port Forwarding for things like FTP, Web services etc. But I'm wondering about Virtual Server. Are the two the exact same? They appear to be pretty close. Here are the descriptions for each as shown at the top of the configuration pages. Virtual Server: The Virtual Server option allows you to define a single public port on your router for redirection to an internal LAN IP Address and Private LAN port if required. This feature is useful for hosting online services such as FTP or Web Servers. Port Forwarding: This option is used to open multiple ports or a range of ports in your router and redirect data through those ports to a single PC on your network. This feature allows you to enter ports in various formats including, Port Ranges (100-150), Individual Ports (80, 68, 888), or Mixed (1020-5000, 689). I'm currently using port forwarding, but I'm not sure which is prefered or which is better. Anyways, if anyone has any information on this, that would be great! Thanks!

Ah yes. I did have a look in there however I had one problem. When I right clicked my subdomain [the domain I manage here at this school] in domains and trusts, I could only find the root domain, no other subdomains. The thing is none of these domains can be contacted anymore. I don't know why they were configured like this, but the other 2 I can't get properties for since they can't be contacted. Should I just remove the trust with the main root domain? Edit: I can't even remove the root domain from trusts, it's greyed out.

New Post with New Information - Please Proceed to Post 6 Hey everyone. Whoa, new design for edugeek Didn't wanna go with phpBB 3 eh? Anyways So at the school I'm working for we have one domain. However for some reason, when we add computers to that domain, they get in the domain list at login "Our Domain", local computer, "Domain of another school in district", "Domain of a second nother school in district". You can't log in to the second 2 domains. I'm not sure why they're in the list or how they get to the list. Since I didn't originally configure the domain and neither did the guy before me, I have no idea how they got there lol. I looked all through active directory for any information, and looked through DNS and couldn't find any records to do with it. If anyone has any information about how I may be able to clear these random stale things I'm finding that would be great! Thanks guys, hope the holidays went well for everyone and you all had a much deserved break! Take care.

So here's a pickle. I have a client who has an XP Home machine [this is at their house not at the school network. They have that XP home machine, and a Dell Inspiron 1521 Windows Vista Home Premium notebook computer. They're running on a home broadband connection with a WBR-2310 router which shouldn't make a difference but adding it for more detail. Both machines have fresh installs on them. XP Home, and Vista machines both have the same workgroup name. I've installed a Dell All-In-One 926 photo printer downstairs on the XP machine. I then shared that printer on the network. When I go to the Vista laptop, I either use the UNC path of the XP machine, or use the add printer wizard, or use the network browser, and using one of those methods, locate the printer. When I add the printer, it says Access Denied. I've looked around a few forums for this problem fix, and nobody has one yet. You'd think they'd allow a simple family printer share to work out of the box, let alone have someone like me go over and not be able to install it for them. So it works perfectly on the XP machine, but not over the network. I cant access the security tab of course becuase it's Windows XP Home and you can't uncheck "Use Simple File Sharing" because the box isn't there on XP home. The only way to access the security tab is by booting into safemode and logging in as the local administrator, which of course, won't help because if you're running in safe mode your not going to see the USB printer anyways cause the drivers didn't load for it. So you can't set security. Has anyone else had problems sharing an XP printer to a Vista machine? It's not a network printer otherwise configuring ports for it would be easy. If anyone has any ideas that would be great. It shouldn't be this hard. Thanks!

Ya both of you are right. Freakin english language lol, it can be looked at from two different ways almost always. What I meant was the certifications are what people look at instead of degrees usually in networking but yes, absolutely yes, it's all about the experience. I know a few MCSE's that were MCSE's in like...NT 4, and don't know a thing about how to implement a server 2003 network, they got jobs, and are having to learn along the way. Hands on experience is always going to be best. There's just too much to come across that schools can't teach you. These forums here? They're better than many text books out there. Talking to other techs is one of the number one ways to improve what you know. Being able to bounce an idea off of someone else who's in your field.