Sunday, November 7, 2010

Windows VISA and 7 on a 2003 domain.

Just added a windows 7 or Vista system to your 2003 domain? Well if you use scripts to map your network drives you will find that none of these network drives are available to the user after login. This is because the new security settings in windows make the user run as a normal user and not as an administrator.

To show how this works. Log onto a system that is experiencing this problem with this misery mapped drive. Now click on the start button and type in notepad. Before running it right click the notepad program that appears in the search results and right click on it. Run as administrator and notepad will open. Now click on File and open and browse to Computer and you will notice your hidden mapped drive is now available. This mapped drive mapped correctly but only works under the administrators' portion of the account not under the user.

Strange!

Well, personally I recommend getting 2008 server and using the new map drive options and stuff. But if you can't do that then simply modify the settings on your vista, win7 box so the user account can see the mapped drives. The following is the changes that you will need to make.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"EnableLinkedConnections"=dword:00000001

Let me know if this helped someone out or not.

2003 and 2008 server fails to restart.

Some of you may have experienced an issue where Windows Server 2003 and 2008 will install updates automatically and attempt to restart. When the system attempts to restart it hangs.

Now here is the strange part...

You RDP into the server with Console access, and you get the message windows is shutting down and then you get kicked off. (and system restarts correctly)

This only happens when you have a KVM switch connected to the server, and it's currently switched to another system, when you switch it to the server in question then the screen flashes very quickly and then restarts correctly.

The reason this is happening is on the login screen the system is showing a screen saver. For some unknown reason, the screen saver will not close down for the restart unless an active mouse/keyboard is connected.

The fix: After much research, simply disable the logon screen's screen saver. But this is harder to do then you may think. This screensaver is not always easy to disable. But is easy once you know how.

Modify the following registry key to disable the screen saver on the server in question. This should fix your problems and allow windows updates to automatically restart as needed without a mouse/keyboard actively needing to be connected.


[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop]
"ScreenSaveActive"="0"

Hope someone finds this helpful.