Renaud Bompuis's questions

We have a Windows 2008R2 server that suffered a power failure a few days ago.
The server is working fine but we are experiencing something strange:

• When the Firewall is on, the server becomes inaccessible from the LAN and all packets are dropped (doesn't even reply to pings from the LAN).

• Strangely, I have a few services configured in the firewall to accept connections from external WAN IPs. These, forwarded by the router, work normally.

In short, I can access the server from home, but not from the LAN at the office.

I had to deactivate the incoming firewall rules to allow access to the server from the LAN, but I would really like to fix that.

More details

1. The Network is correctly configured and NLA has correctly identified the firewall profile as "Private Network":
   

2. The Firewall properties are correctly set:
   

3. The services accessible from the outside world have their rule configured like this:
   

So the real issue here is why does the firewall now suddenly blocks all LAN traffic?

Our Windows Server 2003 SP2 has been hit by a hacker that installed a few services and other niceties and disabled our firewall.

I've managed to clean up (the strange thing is that no detection software I used was able to find anything wrong) but the firewall is still down and I'm getting the above error when trying to open its configuration.

I've followed a few links but nothing seems to work. Is there a way to re-install it?

Stuff I tried:

• Change Windows Firewall settings
• http://www.chicagotech.net/Security/xpfirewall1.htm

The premise

I've been tasked with finding a solution to the following scenario:

• our main file server is a Linux machine.
• on the LAN, users simply access the files using SMB.
• each user has an account on the file server and his/her own access rights.
• user accounts are simple passwd/group security accounts, not NIS/LDAP.

The problem

We want to give users (or at least some of them, say if they belong to a particular group) the ability to access the files from the Internet while travelling.

Ideally

• I'd like a seamless solution. Maybe something that allows the user to access a mapped drive would be ideal.
• A web-oriented solution is also good but it should present files in a way that is familiar to users, in an explorer-like fashion for instance.
• Security is a must of course, and users would be expected to log-in.
  The connection to the server should also be encrypted.

Anyone has some pointers to neat solutions?
Any experiences?

Edit
The client machines are Windows only.

I'd like to have a Scheduled Task (or a script of some sort) perform an automated interactive logon at a given time on Windows Server 2003.

The reason is in this question I've asked a short while ago: I need to automate an application but have not found a way to do so without a full graphical login, as if the user was actually connected to the desktop.

I'm not looking for RunAs: what I need is to force the Server to login a particular user, as if that user was on the console or in a Remote Desktop session in Terminal Services.

Thanks for any input.

I'm faced with a problem:
Under Windows Server 2003, I need to automate an application (Sage 100) that doesn't have any automation service of its own.

First attempt

I found -and was impressed by- AutoHotKey and have been able to create an appropriate script to automate the application, however, it won't work as a scheduled task as there is no graphical login option in the Scheduler: the task starts, but the AutoHotKey script is unable to detect the windows and send keyboard keys.
The result is that the task just sits there, never performing its actions and never ending.

1) It there a way to force a graphical login, say force a login into a Terminal Service session on the server?

2) Alternatively, is there another way to perform these kinds of automation?

Thanks for your input.

Edit

Thanks so far for the suggestions but I can't find if any of them can actually solve the issue at hand: they all more or less work in the same way that AutoHotKey does and I cannot find any info actually suggesting that these replacements would work better when running under a Scheduled Task when the user is not logged in.

On a RedHat derivitive (CentOS 5.2) linux email server, I'd like users to be able to set an "Out of Office" auto-reply.

The mail server stack uses postfix + amavisd + dovecot + roundcube for the main elements.
Users only have access to the server through email (no shell or file access).

User will enable and disable the "out of office" service by themselves, either by sending an email to a certain account or through other mean.
It must be simple to use for users.

Some of the features I'm looking for "Out of Office" auto-replies:

• ideally, only send the notification to a given sender once over the period of absence.

• doesn't send notification to mailing lists.

• must be server based and not require the user to have their mail client open (I know that Thunderbird can be configured to do that, but it's not a practical solution for us).

• ideally, allow the user to set their own message (we have users speaking different languages, some will be able to check their emails while they are away, other won't, so I'd like to give them the choice).

Thanks for any help.

Using a RedHat-derivative distro (CentOS), I'd like to keep the list of regular users (UID over 500), and group (and shadow files) pushed to a backup server.
The sync is only one-way, from the main server to the backup server.

I don't really want to have to deal with LDAP or NIS.
All I need is a simple script that can be run nightly to keep the backup server updated.
The main server can SSH into the backup system.

Any suggestion?

Edit:
Thanks for the suggestions so far but I think I didn't make myself clear enough.
I'm only looking at synchronising normal users whose UID is on or above 500.
System/service users (with UID below 500) may be different on both system.
So you can't just sync the whole files I'm afraid.