Florent Courtay's questions

I've got an SQL database on an azure VM (non domain) that i'd like to backup to our internal DPM 2012 server. I've installed the DPM agent on the Azure VM, setup DCOM to use only the ports 5000 to 5025 on both the VM and the DPM server, created the 135, 5000-5025, 5718 5719 endpoints on azure and on the VM's firewall.

When trying to add this agent to the DPM server, I end up with an error, "Unable to contact the protection Agent on server .cloudapp.net"

I know there is some sort of connection between them, as using a wrong password gives me an Invalid Credentials error.

The error seems to be DCOM related : When trying to connect to the Azure VM from the DPM server using VBEMTest, i get an Error "0x800706ba The RPC server is unavailable", but access is deneid when using wrong credentials )

What am i missing ? Has someone been able to achieve this kind of setup ?

Thanks for your help !

Possible Duplicate:
Can you help me with my software licensing question?

The question is in the Title, I had the impression that you needed a Windows 2008 R2 KMS key to setup the KMS host, even if you wanted to activate Windows 7 licenses only. Am I wrong ?

I'm currently looking into implementing DFSR, with the following setup:

2 Offices in the US 2 Ofices in Europe

The offices are currently using a NAS where I just copy stuff when needed, and have VPN connectivity over 20MB lines.

It will be around 1TB of files, mostly big static files, and a few little files that will be accessed/edited more often (think ms office files).

Is there a way to know what hardware would be needed to implement DFSR at my scale ? I've read about I/Os requirements, but will it be a bottleneck for me with max 40 to 60 people accessing the DFS at the same time?

I'm looking for a way to prevent people to send emails to anyone but a whitelist of trusted contacts / trusted domains.

Currently we're using an outlook macro to achieve that, but i'm wondering if there's a way to do this within Exchange ?

WE're urrently using Exchange 2003, but are planning on upgrading to exchange 2010. Maybe this feature already exists in Exchange 2010 ?

I'd like to deploy Office 2010 on Citrix servers, but i can't enable form scripting support.

With outlook 2007, it was solved by adding Outlvbs.dll in the office directory, and running

msiexec /i {<Outlook GUID>} ADDLOCAL=OutlookVBScript /qb

But it seems this does not work anymore with Outlook 2010, I get the following error :

Error 2711. An internal error has occured. (OutlookVBScript).

I don't get much help from microsoft support site, as there isn't a lot of informations on office 2010 yet. Have anyone succeded in installing and using outlook 2010 with form scripting in a citrix environment ?

We can't really do our job correctly without scripting, and sometime these scripts can be difficult to create / debug with only text editors

I'm currently using UltraEdit or Notepad++ as text editors and scripting platform (syntax highlighting is almost mandatory), but I was wondering if there was a more advanced scripting environment, an IDE of some sort, for VBscript and Powershell mostly ? (like always, free is better, but if the tool is really good I'm not against paying for it)

I'll have to deploy virtual machines on demo laptops, which will use Vmware player, but I've got some security concerns, as some data stored in the virtual machines are a bit sensitive.

Is there a way to prevent the copy of these virtual machines ? Are the virtual hard drives encrypted, and if not is there a way to encrypt them ? In short, is there a way to lock down everything so that nobody could copy and or use these VMs in another computer ?

EDIT :

Truecrypt to encrypt the VM could be a solution, but if the password used by truecrypt is leaked, then it becomes useless. Associating the VM with a computer so that it can only run on a specifica hardware should do the trick, but I haven't found a solution that allows me to do that...

While we currently only use windows mobile smartphone, my boss seems less and less reluctant to try and choose a new kind of OS for our users corporate phones.

For some reasons, we can't use a Blackberry Enterprise Server, so i guess our only choice is between Iphone OS and Android (or Blackberry without BES ? I don't really know if this works fine)

We need activesync capable smartphones of course, and activesync security policies must be available (pin when using your phone for example). Centralized Phone management would be nice too :D

Any ideas on what should be the best smartphone to choose for our users ?

Edit :

My users expectations are full email, contact and calendar integration. Users can't plug anything to their computers, so everything must be done oveer the air. From our side, security matters, security policies like password protected access to the phone are almost mandatory.

I'm deploying VMware player through a GPO, and I'd like to apply specific ACLs to the install folder, and to the D:\VMWARE folder I'm creating during the player install. I also have to add the vmware user account the "can log on locally" right. To do so, I've created a GPO whose scope is the same as my Vmware player install GPO. This GPO works well, BUT when applied at the same time as my deployment GPO, it seems to be applied before the deploy GPO, and then : - Cannot find the vmware user account - Cannot find the c:\program files\vmware folder - Cannot find the D:\vmware folder because none of them have already been created by the vmware player install. And the only way for me to apply my security GPO is to execute gpudate /force command manually, which i don't want to use (it's supposed to be an automatic install)

I've checked the gpo processing order, my security GPO should be applied AFTER my install GPO (security GPO is number 1, deploy GPO is number to), but it don't seem to be the case.

Does anyone got an idea to solve this ?

My users keep unplugging our meeting rooms computers network connection.

As i can't check the computers every time a meeting ends, i'd like to find a tool, preferably running on windows, that can monitor some cisco switch ports state, and every time a cable is being unplugged, send me an email.

I know that some monitoring solutions can do that already, but i wonder if something simplier (and preferably cheap / free of course !) exists.