NetworkGeezer

I suspect both Geoff and Jeff would call that a bit ad hominem What would be a fair comparison?

Be that as it may surely it's the out of the box experience that counts. How safe is the product presented to each customer at time of purchase.

Or you could do this FOR /R "" %f IN (*.OCX) DO regsvr32 /S "%f" and put the kettele on

The problem of doing it this way is that the further you get from the normal full backup then the more files you have to backup. This means on Wednesday or more likely Thursday you could loose much of the time advantage that was originally sort. Media capacity could be a worry if you have a very limited budget.

Not quite. It is prefereable to have all incremental tapes availible for a complete restore but for a partial restore it isn't necessary. If say you Tuesday incremental backup got corrupted you could still restore files from other days of the week.

When you say export a report into word do you mean that Word document is the output type of a SIMS.net report? Is this the first time this happened on this machine? Can the same user produce the required report on another PC. Can she produce an Excel report? Have you checked macro security normally Word mail merge from SIMS.net will not work if the setting is high. You need to have it at medium so you can selectively enable/disable macros.

It's better to have them on different tapes so that a problem during one backup doesn't take out the other. There's nothing about incremental backups which says you have to append to end of existing backup. This should only be the case if you can't get hold of any more tapes of the right capacity. These days incrementals are done more for time considerations than cost of media

Have you set a value for the LANID environmental variable?

Startup/Shutdown scripts run in the local SYSTEM context. You have to put the domain accounts of the target computers in a security group with access to the S: drive (SIMS share).

I remmember reading somewhere of about somebody using ThunderBird as middle man. Import then re-export. Anyway, aren't OE DBX files just plain text anyway?

Are you sure about that? It is very insecure.

Well technically, unless your on the official beta program, no one can make that judgement yet as the new version of SIMS isn't out. If you have the money go for the full MS SQL Server 2005. As you say MSDE is starting to crack at the seams for you. You have around SIMS users and access via RM portal. Now SQL Express has fewer capacity restrictions than MSDE but the way your school's going you may be hitting the limit sooner than later.

The clients initiate connections to the server so if all the ports are blocked on the firewall then they won't be able to connect to the server. From what I have read here most people don't bother with software firewalls for PCs on their school LAN. They rely on good security practices e.g. permissions and patching and a perimeter firewall on their broadband connection. If you are certain you need software firewall on your server then make exceptiosn for common protocols such as CIFS/SMB, DNS, DHCP, ADS

Domain admin password? You are kidding aren't you? Anway, I think you can use GPO to make other accounts local administrators. Altertively, login as a local admin and map the S: drive using a domain account password. Either way you get installion rights without endangering your network. Using a domain admin account on client PC is probably like interactively using a root account on a *nix box. very bad.

If they're removing profiles then they should have been synced at logoff. Could you explain what you mean by syncing?

But if the problem DC is not responding as a DC then there is effectively no AD so any newly promoted DC will have nothing to replicate. DNS is probably most promising avenue. Also look at the directory service to see if that's up. Firewall configs in case something is blocking off ports - long shot but worth a try. Check for unexpecyed listners on relevant ports Dos_Box do you have no backups whatsoever?

Ah you were caught holding the clue candle hence it becomes your job.

How about just using the MOVE command. This works folders so longs as you don't try to jump across drive/partition boundary. It will be quicker than XCOPY as it just involves changes to the file table rather than copying whole files. Besides I think you would need the /H switch or else it wouldn't copy the user hive which is normally hidden. If you wanted to be really fancy you could get the SID prefix of the group users you want to delete then search for the corresponging paths in the profilepath key in HKLM.

This should be a problem if the GPO is a loop back on an OU for student PCs or if the script is run as a scheduled job on each of the machines. Either way you can determine which macines to ignore.

Presumably if they are acting as the ISP for local schools

And how would your NM feel about all the entries saying "posted on Edugeek"

Domain\Users are members of the local "Users" group. In any case you can also set the permissions explicitly for Domian\Users if you are connected to the network. You can set file/folders permissions in a GPO. Can't remember the exact path though.

What about just setting file permissions on this folder to read-only for normal users. That's why they can't can store files in Program Files or Windows folders. If you have to give them elevated priviliges for any reason then you need something like DeepFreeze or Microsoft's Share Computer Toolkit

An incremental backup stores files that have been modified since the last backup. Hence the saving in time and space (i.e. less files requirng less storage space to backup over a shorter time). The idea is you do a full backup (all files backed up whether recently modifed or not) when it's quiet e.g. at the weekend then incremental backups during the rest of the week. The incremental backup on Monday will store files that have been modified since the full backup on Fri/Sat. Then the backup on Tuesday saves any changes since the Monday backup. The Wednesday backup saves changes since Tuesday and so on. A file to be backed up is marked with an archive attribute. That's why not everything is backed up. It can be tricky if e.g. you copy files from one server to another or from CD then they will all get backed up even though they might not have actually been modified recently.

A LANID was enivormental variable used to identify different workstations in the old SIMS Launcher (i.e. dBase) days. Haven't you done the SQL conversion yet?