Martin's questions

Appologies if this doesn't make sense - I'm just starting to play with DFS and some of the terms are still confusing to me.

We have created a couple of DFS roots (as domain roots) on our domain and set up replication and all appears to be working great. The only problem, and i don't know if it is a problem or working as intended is that although I can navigate to the root namespaces by opening \domain.local\Shares (Shares being the root namespace) I am not able to see the Roots if I browse to \domain.local.

I would like my users to be able to see all the available roots by browsing from just the domain - is this possible? Have I done something wrong?

I don't know if it is important but DFS and the Shares are running on two member file servers in seperate sites.

All my users workstations are part of our corporate domain. Currently we have a group policy that forces the company wallpaper through to all workstations. This is working fine. However, we have a number of users who have asked if we can provide alternative colour wallpapers - we are fine with allowing this as a number of them have impaired vision and find the current colour dificult to use.

I don't want to allow unrestricted changes but it would be nice to offer a limited number of wallpapers and allow the users to choose from the selection.

Is this possible, and if so how would I go about implementing it?

We have a three site wan and are struggling to get WINS working in one of the sites. We've tried lots of trouble shooting and think it may be a result of miss configured master browsers.

However I'm struggling to understand which machine should be set up as Master Browsers.

Every site has a domain controller that also acts as a DNS and WINS server. Sites A and B seem to be operating correctly and when users open Network browser they can see all the machines in their own site and the other site - however Site C can only see computers in their own site and they do not appear with network browser of the other sites. We've checked replication and it appears to be working.

Am I right in thinking that each of the domain controllers should also be master browsers and no other servers should be.

Sorry if the above is a bit garbled - I'm struggling with this and failing to find any sensible documentation.

Trying to automate a manual procedure in place currently. This is on a Windows 2008 server.

Is there a method to create a self extracting (.exe) zip file from a commandline/batch file?

I have SQL Server 2005 operating on a remotely hosted server and wish to access it from my own machine using management studio

The firewall on the remote server is allready setup to allow all traffic from my external IP - and that works great.

However I have a load balancing router that has a second line attached to it - unfortunatly the second line has a dynamic external IP.

I need to therefore set up a rule in the router to always send data from Management studio on the first line - but I need to know the port numbers.

Can you advise?

We are a medium sized company based across several sites and with a number of home workers. We have more or less settled on Skype as our defacto method of communication. At the moment the only pain is ensuring that everybody has all the other employees added to their contact list. Can be a real pain when a new employee starts and they have to send details to everyone else and vice versa.

Is there a solution that allows us to manage a central contacts list that we can push out to new/existing users?

Can you adivse how to enable the Remote Desktop/Terminal services service to listen on two different ports at the same time?

ie. I wish to connect using either port 3388 or 3389

This is on a windows 2003 server

Is it possible to migrate a Windows Standard 2003 installation to a Windows Standard 2003 R2 installation.

We have a Domain controller that is currently on 2003 but wish to take advantage of some functionality that is only available in the R2 edition. We have the necessary licenses and media but not sure if it is possible or indeed how to go about doing it.

Background:
My developers complained that they were no longer able to run IIS in their development environments and they very usefully tracked it down to the following issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;297519

Looking into it further it would appear that someone/something has altered the default domain group policy to add a single domain admin account to the Logon as a batch job right.

This obviously wiped out the default settings on all the workstations. We've yet to track down why it happened, but have at least identified how to remedy it.

Have tested on a single machine and indeed adding IWAM_MACHINENAME and IUSR_MACHINENAME to the Logon as a batch job right allows the devlopers to continue as previously.

Question:
I have no desire to go around and do this manually on all the machines in the company. Rather I am hoping that I can correct this in the same way it was perpatrated - via a group policy. My problem is, how do I add the accounts and replace the MACHINENAME part with the actual machine name when setting up the policy?

Update:
I've accepted Evan answer below because it does resolve the specific problem I asked about. However I was being a bit of an idiot. Removing the bad policy actually caused all the original assignments to return after a GPUPDATE. I'd forgotten that rather than being wiped, they were overridden. This was the case and made the job a whole lot easier - all fixed!

We have a strange situation that I am trying to resolve.

One of our users is reporting that some emails that contain attachments are not coming through to them. After some investigation it appears that they do infact recieve the emails but the attachment is missing.

I check the message tracking logs and what appears to be happening is that the server recieves an email, which is then forwarded to the correct mailbox. A couple of minutes later another email, from the same sender is recieved - but this is much larger so I'm assuming contains the attachment. This email has the same messageId as the previous email and as a result appears not to be delivered to the users mailbox, instead being marked with an EventID of DUPLICATEDELIVER.

Can anyone shed any light on the situation?

I quite often use the handy subnet calculator here:

http://www.subnet-calculator.com/

Which I find very useful. However, does anyone have details/a link for a version of this that offers similar functionality but is in an excel spreadsheet.

I could then include it in a worksheet and I wouldn't have to keep visiting the website. Also handy if I don't have internet access - which can often be the case when I need it.

We are in the process of moving away from POP3 email to an exchange server solution. One of the main reason is to make it easier to manage a company wide contact list.

I've done some reading around and found that contact lists can either be managed in AD and then appear in the GAL or we could set up a Public Folder for a 'shared contact list'

What I haven't found a clear guide to is the benefits/pitfalls of each approach.

Can anybody here provide some advice so that I can make a more informed decision.

Regards

Is it possible to produce a list of all tables within a specified database that don't have a primary key?

This is SQL Server 2005.

We use Windows Authentication for connecting to our internal SQL Server instances (a mix of 2005 and 2008).

When I open SQL Server Management Studio and connect to a server it obviously connected me using my current domain credentials.

Is it possible to somehow override this and log on as an alternative domain user?

The aim is to check that users have been set up correctly and can access the DBs that I want them to.

I know I could login to a windows session as them, and do it that way, but that seems a tad tedious.

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

As I understand it, and feel free to correct me if I am wrong, My OEM copies of Server 2003 or Server 2008 are supplied with 5 CALS.

Additionally, a User CAL means that the named user can connect to any server I may have.

Does this mean that if I buy two copies of Server 2003 I in effect am fully licensed for 10 users to access both servers?

Much appreciated.

Edited for pedants.

Currently we have a Vigor 3300 router that acts as our VPN server. At the moment we set up connections for home workers manually in the device.

What I would like to do is remove this extra step and instead allow them to use their Active Directory credentials to login to the VPN. I understand RADIUS is the way to do this. Unfortunately the manual for the Vigor is quite cryptic, although it give details on how to set up the unit itself I am unsure about how I set up the actual RADIUS server.

Can any one offer some generic advice on how to do this, or point to a resource on the internet that is idiot proof.

Much appreciated.