Gleep

I was a Microsoft Fan until yesterday when I went in to build my new computer at my friend's computer shop. Here's basically what he told me. On all new microsoft applications you MUST register each time you install. Inculding OS's. Now you can ONLY register twice on the internet, after that you HAVE to call them to register. They monitor how long it has been since you last installed. The phone staff can also tell you what IP you registered from, and who your ISP is. Here's the kicker. They will only let you register 10 times. After that go buy another copy. Here's what happened. He was building a computer for a client who had purchased Office 2000 with his system. My friend not knowing about this just clicked next next next through the registration process just to get through it like most of us do. He normally installs everything twice to make sure that everything is working properly (fdisk, reformat, reinstall). Something went wrong the first time so he did it two more times to be sure. On the 3rd time, Office wouldn't let him register. So he called MS thinking it was something simple and the phone rep laid it all out for him. You have to register each and every time you install. You can only register a maximum of 2 times online. After that you must call. They will only re-register 10 times for one license. If you are not connected to the internet, you must call them each and every time you want to install any of their products. THIS INCLUDES OS's. Their reasoning is that this is the only way they can stop piracy. While this may work, the rest of the honest folk are fux0red. Most of the office machines I am not worried about. A majority of the basic workstations have only been formatted twice. Once to install NT, and 2 years later to install Win2k. The highend machines get formatted more regularly because my users tend to open nasty e-mails and get infected, or we juggle around workstations. Even then I think the most formatted for those are about 5 times. The graphic stations are a little different simply because of what the users do. They tend to get reformatted often. My home station gets reformatted VERY regularly. Twice a month, sometimes more. And that's not counting the bad installs. On a given instance I might reformat 3 times to get my system exactly where I want it. And when tweaking, if you screw something up, you need to reformat. This rant is so long, only because they are ramming the hard-core computer crowd up the ying-yang. Hurrah for MS, those bastards.

4. Sweet, didn't know that. We don't do a lot of encrypting here hehe. My second choice is what you said "or change the password and logon as that user to remove the encryption. You shouldn't delete a user that soon anyway; all you have to do is disable the account as soon as you are told the person is leaving."

You have a few options. 1) Lease 3 static ip's from your isp. They should give you one (unless your isp uses dynamic or your router is a dhcp server, in which case you wouldn't have this problem in the first place). This is the easiest solution. No additional hardware, if your home network is already up and running. You just configure the clients with the ip's and stick the router into the hub and then your off. 2)Use Win2k ICS. This is also easy and only requires one IP. 2 nics in the win2k machine, one nic your public IP. The other nic will automatically have 192.168.0.1. Have your clients either use DHCP or give them statics of 192.168.0.2 and .3. IP. 192.168.0.2 Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0 Gateway 192.168.0.1 (Server) 3) Use a 3rd party NAT/Proxy like Winproxy or Winroute. I have used Winproxy and winroute at the office. Winproxy- Easy to setup, but closes tons of ports. Bad for gaming WinRoute- Awesome software, just a little difficult to setup. But once its running, it runs great. The 3rd party solutions require one machine to be a server, and 2 nics are required in the server machine. There are a lot of ways to set it up. If money isn't an issue I would go with #1. If money is #2 as its free. All but #1 assume you have your home network configured and running.

1. You can restore Active Directory from a windows backup, but to be exrtra sure you use Directory Services Restore mode. 2.Don't know, never had to do it. 3. Personally I would move the printer to the same subnet that the server resides on. That's just me though. 4.Take ownership of the folder. That should give you access to it, or atleast allow you to nab the files. 5. What clutch said =P I was trained for NT, and most test questions involve enterprise situations. That was fine for NT because I was trained for enterprise environment...but with 2000 I work with a 30 comp lan, so my answers are prob fubared. =)

Update: The problem was that certificate server was not installed. I didn't see that in any of the documentation I had on VPN. Nor did it say that you needed IIS installed. Gooo Sybex! Anyhow once I did that connection was not refused, well in the same way. It took my login and password then spit out that "It could not connect, check server type and contact your ISP and/or Systems Administrator." Tried re-installing RRAS, didn't work. Tried opening ports up on the firewall, didn't work. Tried shutting down the firewall, didn't work. All outta ideas. I ordered a second dsl line that should be coming in soon. That will make it easier to test.

First let me say thanks to clutch for helping me out on my last few threads. Appriciate it. Now that we have the network stable, we are trying to add in VPN. The VPN server is also a NAT router. Routing and Remote access closed off alot of ports, specifically the ports that Inet/Mail/FTP ran on. So I opened up all ports in R&RA. I then gave my account remote access privs. I tested the connection from the server (Creating a vpn connection from the server), and that worked, but I didn't put any faith in that test, since it was the server communicating with the server. I was hoping though, that if the firewall was misconfigured I would get an error. I didn't so I went home to test. When I got home I got a "VPN Server is refusing connection". I assumed this was the work of WinRoute. So today we opened up the ports as suggested by MS (see below): <I>If VPN traffic is traveling through a router or firewall, configure the router or firewall to pass PPTP (TCP Port 1723 and IP Protocol ID 47 [GRE - Generic Routing Encapsulation]) or L2TP over IPSec (UDP Port 500 and IP Protocol ID 50 [Encapsulating Security Payload]) traffic to and from the VPN server.</I> The computer will not answer. I even tried disabling the Firewall/NAT software (WinRoute) and that got me no answer. The Client machine is a Win ME box, with VPN adapter configured. Any ideas fellas? Any other networking forum that deals with specifically this kind of problems that I could visit? Thanks Bo

I have a problem with my clients. There are a few programs that will only work when you give out administrative privs. Quickbooks Pro, and Quick Q Call Server for one. Clients are properly setup as far as I can tell, they can access network resources and such. This is happening on both static and DHCP clients so I know the info is correct. Any ideas?

I had the same problem but a different cause. The clients were looking to the DC and because I have DNS forwarding in winroute on, it sent the DNS query to my isp's DNS server. Fixed it by stopping winroute, stopping the dns service, then restarted the DNS service. Then restarted winroute and that fixed the problem.

I got it out of PIO mode, the HD is in DMA mode right now. It improved performance, but its still slow. How fast would an 82 meg file be, moved to a different partition on the same physical disk? Took 15 seconds w/DMA. Only reason I am sketching...on my ME box its 4 seconds max.

I just built a new server for our office. Specs: 1ghz KT7-Raid 3 30 IBM ATA-100 256 Generic Ram I am just not satisfied with the performace of this box. I have a similar box running 2000 pro and it flies. HD Tach scores are horribly low, but they are low on both systems. 15 ms access time 30 read On my ME box I get 8 ms access time and 100 mbs read. I have service pack 1 installed. I have not installed the VIA 4-in-1 patch on this new install. I installed the Ultra-ATA last install and it really really tanked HD performance. Any Idea's?

Ok this is really stupid and since everybody got it in school, I never asked, but can someone please explain how you enable fast ethernet? I have two 10/100 cards, a 10/100 hub, and I assume I have to by red or yellow cat 5 cable. Is that it? Right now my home machines are running at 10 (using blue cat 5 cable, and my old hub is only 10 Mbs 4 port hub). I also have DSL running into the Hub. I assume that I have to have that connected as is now. Am I going in the right direction? Also, how do I check network speed? Running 98 machines at home, but I would like to know for work too (NT/2k machines) [This message has been edited by Gleep (edited 02 June 2000).]