nhinkle's questions

We are using Microsoft SCCM 2007 to deploy program packages in our network environment. One of the packages (MathType, in case anyone's curious) has a lot of file names with a plus symbol + in them.

When a package is downloaded to a client machine, the files are pulled from the distribution point server via http. The distribution point runs IIS, which does not handle + signs in URLs. The result is that the SCCM client receives a 404 from the server, and is unable to finish downloading or installing the package.

I would just rename all of the files with a + in them, but the installer is expecting certain file names, so we need to retain the original naming scheme. Due to how our network environment is set up, we do not have direct control over the distribution point server, so we can't make any modifications to IIS that would allow + symbols in URLs.

How can we distribute packages that include files with a + symbol without breaking SCCM?

I've thought of the following workarounds, but would like to find a more elegant solution that doesn't require manually adjusting any package with + symbols:

• Put the whole thing in a self-extracting zip/7z file, and download that from the distribution point
• Rename all of the files+with+plusses to files_with_plusses, then manually change them back to the original name in the installation batch file once they're downloaded to the local cache

Is there a solution that actually fixes the problem, rather than working around it?

As a testing environment, I have set up a vmware virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 R2. I have Apache and PHP installed (as part of the xampp package). I am doing the development outside of the VM, and so want Apache to serve PHP files from a VM shared folder (which appears as a network share in the VM). I have done this by creating an NTFS symbolic link in Apache's htdocs directory. I can access this directory from the browser, and plain-text files are readable. However, PHP fails to process files, instead returning the following error:

Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required 'C:/xampplite/htdocs/path/to/file.php' (include_path='.;C:\xampplite\php\PEAR') in Unknown on line 0

It appears to be a permissions issue — PHP doesn't seem to be allowed to read the file to process it. However, Apache has no problem opening files in the directory. I cannot figure out how to give PHP the necessary permissions to process the file. Does anybody know of a way to make this work, or else another solution for getting the files into the VM automatically while I develop on the host machine?

Occasionally I need to put registry entries into batch files to use in login scripts, unattended installers, etc. While it's pretty easy to add one or two registry commands to a batch file using reg.exe, when there is a large amount of registry data, it becomes tedious. I usually just end up merging an external reg file in those cases, which I would like to avoid, since it ruins the self-contained nature of the batch file. Does anybody know of any tools which can automatically convert a .reg file to a series of REG ADD and REG DELETE commands? This would make life a lot easier! Thanks.