James' Tools and Tricks

We have started trying to better organise our groups into a more role based system, so that membership of one group is based on a role rather than a person. That way if the person holding a position changes (holiday, retirement, etc) we just make one change and the replacement user gets all the correct [...]

On a Windows 7 laptop I was trying to set up Offline Files with encryption enabled. After syncing the files and going into Manage Offline Files -> Encryption -> Encrypt everything seemed to go OK, but it would then keep reporting Access Denied when it tried to sync any new files. After some searching I [...]

As part of a test for removing legacy protocols from the network I disabled NetBIOS over TCP/IP to see if any system would be adversely affected. After disabling NetBIOS for the server used by our Fuji-Xeros ApeosPort-II 4000 Photocopier, the Network Scanning feature was unable to upload the scanned file to the SMB server. Instead [...]

I have received a few questions asking about Papercut so here are some of the details about it and what we use it for. Papercut can run on a Windows Server (2003, 2008 or 2008 R2) using windows print queues or a Novell Linux OES server with iPrint (CUPS & SAMBA), it is written in [...]

Often you would like some personal information filled in for the user before they start the application. E.g. Why have Office or Acrobat ask for the users name when it is already stored in active directory? Here are some simple VBScripts that can be added to a log on script or similar to pre-fill these [...]

This post is to assist in the setup of a BackupPC system able to backup in use files by using MS volume snapshots. It also has the benefit of only having the RSync daemon running during the backup which increases security.

Recently I migrated all our printers from a Server 2003 R2 x32 print server to Server 2008 R2 (x64). During this upgrade all the printers had x64 drivers added and their security settings checked. However, I kept experiencing problems in Print Management with the HP printers reporting the Printer driver is not installed, even after [...]

I have just been setting up a new Windows Server 2008 R2 box up as a terminal server. As part of this I enabled the Desktop Experience feature, however this also enabled Windows Mail. Windows mail seems to generate large amounts of ESENT messages in the log file as it tries to backup the mail [...]

How to deploy Google Earth to C:\Program Files\Google\Google Earth instead of Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Earth by removing AdminUser checks from the MSI.

We are gradually migrating our core services from Netware to Windows Server 2003 and 2008. As part of this migration we needed to migrate all our DHCP reservations stored on our Novell servers to Windows Servers.