Lessons Learned

Things I wish I had known…

September 24th, 2005

Mac Office 2004 SP2

This past week, Microsoft released Service Pack 2 for Office 2004 for the Mac. Among the enhancements are significant improvements in the Entourage mail client. Some of these improvements are available after installing KB 888619 on Exchange 2003 or 892896 on Exchange 2000.

Improvements provided in Office 2004 SP2 include:
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September 17th, 2005

Creating Read/Write Mac Shares on a Windows Server

By default, when you creat a new Mac volume on a Windows Server using the Services For Macintosh GUI interface, the new share gets created with Read-Only permissions for all Mac users. In order to allow Mac users to be able to modify the contents of the volume, you have to go back and manually change remove the “Read Only” checkbox from the settings on the share.

I just stumbled across the command line that can be used to create the Mac share and make it Read/Write from the get-go:

    macfile volume /add /name:volname /path:dirpath /readonly:false

where volname is the name you want the users to see when they access the volume and dirpath is the full path to the folder on the server that should be used as the root of the share.

Because I’m lazy and don’t like typing in full pathnames, I created the following batch file to create a new Macintosh volume share using teh current working directory as the root of the volume:
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September 14th, 2005

Allocated Memory Alerts Redux

If you haven’t checked out Susan’s post on Allocated Memory Alerts, you absolutely should. I did. A long time ago. But I wasn’t too concerned because I didn’t have too many sites running SQL and ISA on the SBS box. And the one that I did have wasn’t generating the Allocated Memory Alerts, so I filed this away under the “might need to know later” file.

Good thing I did. Here’s what happened:
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September 13th, 2005

Check those local policies

Recently I got a call from a client whose Windows XP workstation would not respond to a remote connection attempt through Remote Web Workplace. Specifically, the error was “The local policy of this computer does not allow you to log on interactively.” My client had gone through and looked in the usual places on the workstation and found that it appeared to be configured correctly.

So I connected in and looked at the local policy of the system and found the problem:
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September 4th, 2005

Upgrading Macintosh Hard Drives

I used to know all the tricks to upgrading Macintosh hard drives, but since OS X, I haven’t had to worry about doing a hard drive exchange. in fact, my last three system upgrades have been resolved with new machines, not with new processor cards or new hard drives or more RAM.

This week, however, I ran into a system that was just flat out of disk space, and because the system had no room to add another internal drive, a hard drive swap was the only solution.
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