You can use a Drive Map preference item to configure the visibility of a physical drive rather than a mapped drive. To do so, select the Update action, leave the Location field blank, select the drive letter of the physical drive, and then configure the Hide/Show this drive and Hide/Show all drives options.

So, to hide “A” drive (in this example), you’d configure the dialog box as follows:

I didn’t know this was possible. This may come in handy one day, if you want to hide something like an OEM partition that has had a drive letter assigned.

1. I set up some new printers on the print server, and shared them out
2. I then used Ricoh’s “Default Editor” application to lock down the colour printing options
3. When attempting to map these printers from a workstation, the user experienced an “Access Denied” error, and the printer would not be connected

I left the problem overnight, and luckily had a brainwave; maybe it was something to do with permissions on the driver files themselves on the print server? Sure enough, resetting the permissions on child items within the %systemroot%\system32\spool\DRIVERS\w32x86 folder solved the problem.

As part of the investigation process, I first used Group Policy Preferences to set the recovery options for the Print Spooler process on each workstation to always restart:

The resolution for the problem is quite a brute-force solution as the problem was confined to only a few workstations. If the problem had been more widespread, I would have narrowed down which dll was causing the problem, and then removed it via GPP using the “Apply once and do not reapply” option or via a PowerShell script.

What I then did was re-install the latest printer drivers for each of the printers that I suspected to be the cause of the problem. This is done on the print server by going to Control Panel, Printers and Faxes, File menu, Server Properties, Drivers tab. You can then select the printer driver in question and click the Reinstall button.

The solution on each workstation was as follows:

1. On the local workstation, start a command prompt as Administrator (Start, “cmd”, ctrl+shift+enter). Enter your admin credentials.
2. Go to c:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3 (this applies to 32bit Windows/drivers only)
3. Delete all files within the above folder (del c:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3\*.*)
4. Restart the spooler. If you don’t do so, you’ll experience errors about Windows being unable to locate the correct driver (net start spooler)
5. That’s it. Close the command prompt window (exit)

Go to Start, Printers, and verify that they’re all there. The Print Spooler service should no longer crash upon viewing the mapped printers. Some printers may have a status of “opening” for a while as they need to re-download their drivers from the print server.

runas /user:domain\sqluser "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\Ssms.exe"

You’ll then see the following messages after being prompted for a password for that user:

Attempting to start C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\Ssms.exe as user "domain\sqluser" ...

get-help about_signing

My CA is (still) a Windows Server 2003 DC, so that’s what this is based on.

1. Connect to your CA using the Certification Authority snapin, and ensure that the Code Signing certificate template is enabled/loaded. If it isn’t, just right-click on Certificate Templates and select New –> Certificate Template to Issue
   
   
2. Ensure that HTTPS is enabled for your CA’s Certificate Services virtual directory, and then navigate to it using IE from your own PC;
   
   https://{CA-name}/certsrv
3. Go to Request a certificate, User Certificate (click Yes, to any IE popups at this point), go to More Options >>>, Use the Advanced Certificate Request form, select the Code Signing certificate template, and then Submit your request.
4. Once your certificate is issued and installed, you’ll be able to view its details using this Powershell command:

Get-ChildItem cert:\CurrentUser\My -codesigning

5. Sign your Powershell script with the following command. I ran into an issue where I received an “Unknown Error”, but this turned out to be because I had created the script from within the Powershell ISE. This handy blog post helped me out.

Set-AuthenticodeSignature .\{script name}.ps1 @(Get-ChildItem cert:\CurrentUser\My -codesigning)[0]

There’s some pretty useful info here, on powershell.com

1. Create a new GPO if necessary, link it to the OU where it needs to be applied
2. Edit the new GPO, and go to Computer Configuration, Preferences, Control Panel Settings, Local Users and Groups
   
3. Right-click in the pane on the right, and select New, Local Group
4. Set up the “New Local Group” as per below. I’ve got it removing all existing users and groups so that we can define everything we need using Group Policy. You add variables like %computername% by pressing F3 whilst the cursor is in a text entry field.
    
   I also included the Description text that is shown on the default local Administrators group; "Administrators have complete and unrestricted access to the computer/domain”
    
5. You also need to add a member called “domainname\%ComputerName%-Admins”. This will allow you to define a group in AD that can be used to assign local admin rights to a particular machine.

   The good thing about this is that you only need to define groups for PCs that you wish to add local admins to, but all PCs that have the GPO applied are ready for this type of setup.
   

6. You can also go into the Common tab and select “Remove this item when it is no longer applied”
   
7. The last step is to create a Security Group in AD with the name {computername}-Admins. For example, if you have a computer named syd-60128, you create a group in AD called syd-60128-Admins. Adding users into that group will then make those users a local administrator for that particular PC.
8. Do a “gpupdate” on the machine in question, and you should see the group’s membership change:
   

I’ve yet to see a good event calendar in any of the CMSes I’ve tried that properly handles recurring events and makes it easy for the layman to update calendar events. I’ve therefore recently implemented a small macro for Umbraco that displays Google Calendar events from a cached XML calendar feed. I did this using the excellent FeedCache plugin and some XSLT.

My one gripe with FeedCache is that you can’t edit the feeds.config file using ConfigTree, but rather need file-level access to it. This is a major bummer, as I wanted to test it on Umbraco Trials.

I won’t post any CSS, but the XSLT caters for styling as it uses bulleted lists and spans around key areas.

The feed will then be displayed similar to below:

Today

* Test Event (19:30-21:30)

Friday 16th October

* Meeting (19:30-21:30)

Sunday 18th October

* Seminar (10:30-12:30)
* Lunch (13:00-14:00)
* Games/Activities (14:30-15:30)

Here’s a screenshot of it working on an Umbraco Trials site. I found a random Google Calendar feed and used that for the demo. Note that I didn’t put any effort into styling the results:

Basically, what you need to do is:

1. Install FeedCache
2. Install the GCal Events List package
3. Set up the calendar feed in FeedCache’s feeds.config. The feeds.config entry should look like this:

   <feed>
    <url><![CDATA[http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/calendar@example.org/public/composite?orderby=starttime&sortorder=ascending&futureevents=true&singleevents=true]]> </url>
    <localFile>GoogleCalendarFeed.xml</localFile>
   </feed>

4. Insert a macro wherever you need it, and fill out the parameters;
   1. numberOfDays – (integer) how many days worth of events you would like to display
   2. xmlFileName (string) the exact file name of the cached XML file in the umbraco\plugins\FergusonMoriyama\feedcache\ folder. eg. googleEvents.xml
5. Call FeedCache from your browser to trigger a pull of the feed(s): http://example.org/umbraco/plugins/FergusonMoriyama/FeedCache/FeedCache.aspx
6. View the page that contains the macro inserted in step 4.

Below are some instructions found on the forum, and the rest of the process that I followed:

1. Download patched DLL
2. Run a Command Prompt as an Administrator, and run the following commands:
   1. takeown /a /f %SystemRoot%\System32\termsrv.dll
   2. icacls %SystemRoot%\System32\termsrv.dll /Grant Administrators:F
3. Stop the Terminal Services service (Windows Key + R, services.msc)
4. Rename the original termsrv.dll (in %systemroot%\system32) to termsrv.dll.bak
5. Copy the patched dll into place
6. Run Registry Editor (Windows Key + R, regedit)
7. Find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server
8. Change the following 2 items:
   1. fDenyTSConnections – New value: 0
   2. fSingleSessionPerUser – New value: 0
9. Start the Terminal Services service

Below is a screen shot of it working on my home PC.

Don’t contact me for help in getting this running, or if this procedure breaks your PC.

If you’re not keen on doing this, an excellent alternative is LogMeIn’s free remote desktop solution.