PowerApp101's questions

I have a spreadsheet on a Windows 2003 R2 server. The clients are all Windows 7 using Excel 2010. If a remote user opens the spreadsheet first then any other "local" user gets access denied if they try to open the file afterwards. By "remote" I mean across a WAN link, whereas "local" means on a LAN to the server.

Is it possible to allow the file to be opened "read-only" instead of getting access denied? The spreadsheet is not configured to be shared within Excel.

This is not a permissions issue, everyone can access the file at the NTFS permissions level.

I suspect it may be to do with op locks and the fact that the remote user is across a slow link (satellite).

I had an existing 2-way DFS-R replication topology set up, consisting of two servers, one was Windows 2003 R2 and the other Windows 2008 R2. This was working fine.

Last week I upgraded the Win 2003 server to Windows 2008 R2. It was a VM, so the upgrade process just involved creating a new Win 2008 R2 OS C: drive and attaching the data disks (vmdk files) from the old VM. I then renamed the old Win 2003 VM to server-old and renamed the new Win 2008 VM to the original old name, like so:

Before (DFS-R between server1 and server2 working ok)
=====================================================
server1 - Win 2003 R2
server2 - Win 2008 R2

After (DFS-R trying to use server1-old and server2)
=====================================================
server1-old - Win 2003 R2 (original server)
server1     - Win 2008 R2 (upgraded new VM)
server2     - Win 2008 R2 (no change)

The problem now is that DFS-R is broken and not replicating, because it is still referencing the old computer name, server-old. There are some Active Directory attributes related to DFS-R still attached to the old computer account.

Am I able to fix DFS-R by associating the old computer account with the new server but keep the original name (server1)? I think this would work as it would fool DFS-R into thinking nothing had changed, and the DfsrPrivate folder still exists. I don't want to have to recreate the replication group as that would mean an initial resync.

We are thinking about purchasing 4 x EqualLogic PS6510X SANs (the Sumo boxes). Each has 48 x 600GB 10k SAS drives.

They will be stacked to form a logical pool of storage (all in the same location).

I understand that when you create a RAID group its done on a "per box" basis. So one box could be Raid 50, another Raid 10 etc.

My question is, should I make one box a "performance" box ie Raid 10, and the other boxes "standard" ie Raid50? How do people configure their EQL arrays in the real world?

If so do they work well? I seem to recall that quotas under W2003 work on a per-volume basis which limits there usefullness. Is W2008 more flexible, maybe allowing per-folder quotas?

I have a large Windows file server with about 2TB of data, about half of that is over 2 years old (based on modification date). What would be the best way of archiving off that old data, using scripts or whatever, but without spending big money on a full archiving (HSM) system?

The purpose is to reduce the backup window, because all that old data is backed up every week when really it never changes and can be backed up much less frequently, thus reducing tape requirements.

BTW the archive would be on another disk, with read-only permissions.

Has anyone implemented something similar? How would users access the archive easily?

Say I install a driver (FC HBA) that immediately blue screens the server (Windows 2003). If I reboot and select Last Known Good, will that enable me to get to the login screen? I know it loads the previous registry.

I need users to be able to copy a folder on a network share to another folder on the same share. They need to copy security too. They cannot use their normal logged in account as it doesn't have enough permissions (the folder is a "template" folder and is locked down with restrictive NTFS security).

So I created a proxy account with full permissions and a batch file that calls runas like

runas /noprofile /env /user:[email protected] z:\copy_folder.cmd

copy_folder.cmd just contains a robocopy command to copy the folder.

The runas fails with "cannot find file copy_folder.cmd". Z: is mapped correctly and I have tried runas without the /noprofile and /env switches but I get the same error.

What syntax should I be using for runas to find copy_folder.cmd?

Do you have a "delete first ask questions later" policy for music and movie files? Or are you more lenient? Just wondering if there's a difference between how large and small organizations deal with the issue.

My client has a Mac at home and wants to remote control (run apps) on a Windows XP PC at the office. What is the best software to enable this? Any Mac <-> Windows weirdness to be aware of?

I need to backup many sites over slow, high latency satellite links. We are talking pings of 650ms to each site. I can get a dump of the initial data by sending out USB disk to site and restoring it at central office. From then on I intend to use rsync or DFS-R for byte-level incremental copies across the link. All the machines are Windows 2003 SP2 R2. I have read that rsync can hang on large files and is still a bit flakey for Windows?

Alternatively should I use DFS-R which also does byte-level copies?

I have tried DFS-R in the past and was not impressed by the lack of logging, it was very hard to find out what was actually going on. That's why I'm interested in rsync. Has anyone any real world experience of both methods?

For example, say I have a full backup done using robocopy. Can I then use rsync to replicate just the changes? Or will rsync do another full copy? I don't want that to happen because it's over a slow WAN link.

I am using the latest VMware Converter Standalone to p2v a physical Windows 2000 Professional SP4 PC. The PC is a standard Pentium with IDE disk from circa 2001. The disk is 20GB partitioned logically into C: and D. It converts with no errors (I did both disks into one VMDK).

When I power on the VM in VMware Workstation 6.5 (or Vmware Player 2.5) it gets to the Win 2000 boot graphic then I get a BSOD with the classic 0x7B Stop error: inaccessible_boot_device.

Is there anything I can do to get the vm to boot? I am lost for ideas, normally p2v of a basic IDE pc works flawlessly.

I'm willing to put a bounty on this as I am trying to sort this out for a client urgently.