Ben Gillam's questions

Facing a problem where we are running out of available network addreses, we are currently on bog standard 192.168.1.x range.

Reading about making more ips available and subnets and think i have just about got my head around it.

My question is, is it as simple as saying to my router (currently handling dhcp) use ip range 172.16.0.1 / 255.255.254.0 and it should hand out ips from 172.16.0.1 to 172.16.1.255? all of which are able to talk to each other?

Or have i got wrong end of stick here? On basis of above is there a way of staying on 192.168.x.x and getting more hosts, we are currently using too many but expansion plans wont see more than another 100 at most in next 5 years.

if you need any more detail please let me know.

Thanks

We are running a Windows 2003 SBS server and Backup Exec 10.1d

We currently have one job which backs up both hard drives then the exchange server, but recently we have had problems with VSS complaining about the Advanced Open File Option and the popular recommendation for this situation was to split the job down the middle and have data and exchange separate.

This I have no problem doing however I need to get a backup to tape every night of everything so cant do data night 1 and exchange night 2 as it would be impractical and leaves us with an every other day backup.

I have seen the append option mentioned in backup exec a few times in the options and im really wondering if it works how i think it could, in other words back up two seperate jobs to the same tape.

For example,

1. Backup Data (no eject after job completes)
2. Backup Exchange
3. Eject Tape.

If this is possible then should I set the Data job to overwrite tape in job setup then for exchange choose append or terminate?

All Together the backup works out to about 101gb, and the drive is an HP LTO1 drive (100/200GB) so thee is room to get everything on there but obviously having not used append before I wasnt sure if this was a supported operation.

I hope this makes sense, thanks in advance.

We have a few users here who are using Facebook during working hours and their productivity is through the floor, as a temporary measure I have remotely edited their hosts files to point facebook.com and its various subdomains to point to the loopback address and then manually comment out at lunch time so they can use it.

This is obviously a bit tiresome doing this for a number of users every day.

I am looking at trying to find something that can do this blocking automatically on schedule.

I was thinking some kind of proxy server which i can add to the proxy settings on their browser via group policy.

Does anyone know of any free or cheapish software solution for windows that will do this? Or maybe something standalone I can install on a PC/VM?

I guess I could always write and schedule some batch files to switch a blocked hosts file with a non blocked one.

Network is Windows 2003 SBS server, Windows XP sp3 workstations, single interface on server Netgear DG834 router which whilst it does have some scheduling it doesn't allow setting of a window only single block window - for example 9-5pm, but I would want to open it in the middle.

We use HTML signatures which are based off a template which gets changed from time to time.

At the moment i have to open all the html files stored on the server into dreamweaver or similar, make the change to a users .htm file then to a find and replace accross the other files, which seems a dirty way of doing it.

What id like to do is use php or some form of script to pull user details from active directory then insert into a template a bit like a winword mailmerge so that when i make a change i can rebuild everyones signatures from scratch using the original template i just edited.

Hope that makes sense. Is this possible with php or would some kind of vbscript be able to achieve the same thing. Not sure where to start, if anyone can give me some pointers that would be great,

I know there are packages out there to manage things like this but the company wouldnt justify the expense.

Any help would be great, thanks

We currently run blackberry professional (express?) to handle our small number of blackberry handsets with exchange.

I am currently studying for BCP-211 and BCP-213 exams and would like to load full BES trial on a virtual machine (along with its own srp key) and this will have internet access.

At present we only have the one external ip nat'd via a netgear dg834 router.

Will this cause problems with the production server which runs on the standard 3101 port.

Thanks

I have recently tried to deploy Adobe Reader 9.1 onto our network here. (SBS 2003 server and XP Workstations)

I followed the instructions for the extraction of the installer and .msi and then creating a .mst transform file to set custom options. (Suppress EULA, dont create desktop icon etc)

I then added the package to my deployment GPO applied the relevant .mst file and preceded to deploy accross the network. The software package is computer assigned to be installed prior to logon, to avoid user permissions issues.

The package deploys correctly to computers and will run perfectly fine if you run from a shortcut, however when trying to view a pdf from within a web browser it fails with the following message.

"The adobe acrobat/reader that is running can not be used to view PDF files in a web browser. Adobe Acrobat/Reader version 8 or 9 is required. Please exit and try again"

I have found many pages on google refering to this problem, but none appear to be in relation the problems I have found.

http :// kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405461.html

These fixes recommend correcting a registry entry (which i should mention is missing after the deployed installation. However this does not work.

Switching off display in a browser - Seems to defeat the object of fixing the problem

Removing old versions - There arent any.

Trying with a different user - This affects all users of all privalige levels on all computers.

On my workstation I uninstalled Acrobat Reader 9.1 then reinstalled manually using the same installation source files and it works fine.

has anyone sucsessfully deployed AR9.1 on their domain and if so how?

For the time being I have downloaded the older 8.1.3 release and deployed this in the same way which works fine, but would like to be using the up to date version.

Thanks