Wednesday 20 January 2010

Permissions required to edit Office documents

The problem lies with the way Office handles ediiting. When a document is opened in editing mode - it creates a temporary file - when you save your changes it overwrites the existing file with the temp file - then when you exit Office it removes the temp file. Office is designed like this for fault tolerance as the temp edit file is updated every minute or so that way you can recover your work after a system crash. This is why the user needs Modify permissions on the Folder the files reside in when edits are made. Otherwise you will get "Access Denied: errors.

Friday 8 January 2010

Exchange 2007 services not starting

If you find that after restarting a server running Exchange 2007 - some critical services are not starting automatically and you have to manually start the Information Store and others - it could be a service startup dependency issue.
 
This is the dependency list for Exchange 2007 that starts up without any problem:
 
AD Topology
Depends on:
    NTDS (AD Domain Services)
 
The following need to start after AD Topology:
Anti-Spam
Edge Sync
File Distribution
IMAP 4
Mail Submission
Mailbox Assistants
POP3
Replication Service
Search Indexer
Service Host
System Attendant
Transport
Transport Log Service
 
Information Store
Depends on:
    System Attendant
    RPC
    Server
    Workstation
    Windows Event Log
 
System Attendant
Depends on:
    RPC
    Server
    Workstation
    Windows Event Log
 
Monitoring
Does not depend on anything
 
If this is setup as above the Exchange should startup normally. If problems still persist you could have a GPO that calls a script that starts the troublesome services manually.

Change Service Dependencies - Windows

Use the Services MSC to view dependencies. If any need changing - fire up regedit
 
Go to : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\<Service name>
 
To create a new dependency, select the subkey representing the service you want to delay, click Edit, and then click Add Value. Create a new value name "DependOnService" (without the quotation marks) with a data type of REG_MULTI_SZ, and then click OK. When the Data dialog box appears, type the name or names of the services that you prefer to start before this service with one entry for each line, and then click OK.
 

Wednesday 6 January 2010

Linux Adventures

I needed to reload my laptop as the Vista installation was becoming a
little heavy handed - and it was using up all but 1.5GB of the partition
it was installed on. The Windows partition was, in my opinion, big
enough to use as a system partition - between system restore (easily
fixed) and WinSxS - which irreversibly enlarged the Windows directory to
over 35GB!
I then decided I would give Linux a go... Excitingly there are like
20-30 linux distributions to choose from. To simplify things there are a
few main (parent) distributions that most of the others are based on -
Redhat, Debian, Gentoo, Suse, etc.
I have tried the Redhat based Fedora Core and the Debian based Ubuntu
before, without much joy. I thought I'd give the new FC 12 a go (maybe
things have changed since FC 8), but nothing seemed to work - WIFI,
Audio, etc. Everything seemed to be an uphill battle so I just gave up.
Next I purchased a Linux enthusiast magazine that had a DVD that
contained a few lightweight "Live CD" distributions. One of these was
Antix, based on Mepis, which is based on Debian. I was pretty skeptical
about it initially, but thought I'd give it a go anyway. Amazingly
EVERYTHING seemed to work out of the box - unlike FC :-)
This is more like it.

I had a couple of objectives in mind:

1. Simple Wireless networking. Works out the box!
2. A usable GUI - the default is a lightweight window manager called
IceWM. Pretty basic, but functional. I opted to upgrade this to KDE 4.
3. Need to access SMB shares on the NAS. A bit of prodding and A for Away.
4. Need to print to the Brother printer attached to my main Windows 7
desktop.
5. Not completely comfortable with being totally without Windows - I
wanted a way to run Windows on the laptop if I needed to. Dual booting
is a pain - so decided to install VirtualBox, then installed XP into the
VM. Very Good.
6. I already use Thunderbird with Lightning backed onto my Gmail account
for Email & Calender and RSS functions. IceDove a re-branded Thunderbird
works a treat - Lightning and Google Calendar extensions work fine.
7. Firefox is the browser of choice as I'm not a fan of the Konqueror
browser. IceWeasel is the re-branded version. I also like the Chrome
browser - there is a Linux beta available. I'll give that a go.
8. For an Office package - I've opted to give the OpenOffice Suite a go
- seems to be mature, stable and compatible. I could install MS Office
onto the XP VM if I really need it.

All in all I'm the happiest that ever I've been with Linux on the desktop.

Honestly it did take a few days of fiddling around and head banging to
get everything up and running, but all came good in the end.