Oliver Hansen

Adobe Acrobat Crashes on OS X With Network Account

I had another network account issue with our Apple at work. Got that one solved and then we finally got the software from Adobe for CS4 after a couple hours on the phone convincing them that they had already said we would get it before they changed their mind. Well, that’s a whole other story I don’t have time for.

This problem lies in the fact that Acrobat for some reason has a problem reading or writing to a file on a network share. Since the user’s home drive is connected to the network share, Acrobat will crash every time they try to open a file. Log in with a local user account and everything works great. After figuring out where the problem lay, I found a posting on the Adobe Forums about this exact issue.
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Apple – AD Login Error: The home folder for the user account is located on AFP or SMB server

I’ve been trying to get our web and print design specialist at work set up with an Apple that was donated to us. It’s not a bad machine but one of the older ones running the Power PC hardware. It’s also running OS X version 10.4.11. Apples are completely new to me so it’s been a challenge. I figured out how to get it to be part of our Active Directory domain a while ago so I thought all would be fine but there have been quite a few problems getting it to work smoothly.

One of the issues is logging on to the computer when home drives are assigned through the Active Directory profile. As a Domain Admin, when I would sign in I would get the message

The home folder for the user account is located on an AFP or SMB server

and it would not log me in. Upon trying again immediately, it would log me in and my home drive would be mapped just fine! I thought it was annoying but we could deal with it at first but when I had the user try to log in with an account that was not an admin they repeatedly got the error and were not able to log on at all.
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Routing and Remote Access Changes From Automatic to Disabled

I’ve been working on setting up an ISA Server 2006 to be a VPN connection for employees. I had it working and then the next day it wouldn’t work. I looked and saw that the Routing and Remote Access service had been not only stopped but disabled. I would turn it back on and then a few hours later it would be disabled. It was really frustrating me. We had used the server for another purpose previously and not reinstalled the OS so I even did that. No luck. The problem kept coming back.

The link below led me to think of Group Policy and I did an rsop.msc on the server to find it was the workstation policy affecting the server. Created a new OU outside the range of the policy which should have been done a long time ago anyways and the problem has been resolved. No more services getting disabled.

My Hint: http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Windows/microsoft.public.windows.server.general/2007-05/msg00216.html

Add New Exchange 2003 Server To Existing Organization

These are the steps I followed to set up a new exchange server which will eventually replace the original exchange server.

Before installation, decide on the best partitioning strategy available with the given hardware. Raid 1 (Mirroring) should be the minimum for redundancy purposes. Raid 5 is generally not the best because of the additional work of calculating parity. Consider these options:
RAID 1 = System volume, operating system, Exchange Server binaries

RAID 1 = Pagefile

RAID 0+1 = SMTP and MTA queues

RAID 1 = Log files from one Exchange Server storage group

RAID 0+1 = Exchange Server databases from storage group
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Using IAS (RADIUS) For Client VPN Authentication To Cisco PIX

I just had an opportunity to set this up again. The domain controller we had that was the RADIUS server crashed over the weekend so this is one of many things I had to get going again. Yes, our backup strategy needs some attention. So anyways, it did give me an opportunity to re-learn how to get this going. The purpose of using RADIUS for the VPN connections is to allow VPN access for the employees we want to have it and let them use their credentials already stored in Active Directory. The less user-names and passwords for employees to remember, the better.

The first thing is that the PIX Firewall (with VPN) was already set up when I got here so I won’t get into that configuration. It used to be configured with local accounts for each person who needed VPN and they had a static password. This was a bit cumbersome and insecure as the password never changed. I had used RADIUS to set up the same sort of thing for wireless authentication so I decided to see if I could get it working for the VPN. It took a little doing but I got it.
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