Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Terminal Servers Redirect Desktop / My Documents to DFS Share

I had setup two terminal servers to redirect the desktop and my documents folder to a network DFS share. This way the users would have the same info on both.
Two annoyances were the errors with My Documents unable to redirect

EventID: 112 Source: Folder Redirection
Failed to perform redirection of folder My Documents. The files for the redirected folder could not be moved to the new location. The folder is configured to be redirected to <\\%HOMESHARE%%HOMEPATH%>. Files were being moved from to <\\my.domain\Data\Home\myuser>. The following error occurred while copying to <\\my.domain\Data\Home\myuser\desktop.ini>:
Access is denied.


It turns out there is an issue with having the my documents folder automatically move the contents of the folder to the new location and the desktop.ini file. Once disabled this went away, luckily my users don't have any data in the local my documents folder so i can get away with this.

And the other annoyance was launching an application from the desktop (now hosted on the network share) now prompted me with a security dialog before allowing me to run any apps on desktop.
This is correctable by setting the Internet Explorer Trusted sites to contain \\my.domain
Instead of doing this for all my users, I setup a GPO with these IE settings.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Orrtax - Intellitax

I have never been fond of Tax software. Having to deal with this one turned out to be more trouble than I could have imagined.
It was tough enough setting this up on a terminal server, but it became nearly impossible after the company got bought out and the online activation servers were taken offline. bah!
Anyway their tech support were schmucks. They even claimed that the 2002 software wouldn't run on Server 2003 because it was an old MS-DOS version, but it did after editing their bat files.

Also their 2003 - 2006 year software can be setup on a terminal server with Full Security if the
%system drive%\program files\Intelltax\
and the
shared %system drive%\intellitax
folders are located.
if not you will get a error that is was unable to start security.

Anyway, I hope no one else has to ever deal with their software.

By the way I was so frustrated with their software and the fact that no one had any good technical info on their software (after googling) that i decided to start a blog.

Now i have the fun of playing with OLTPro Desktop 2008. Hopefully they write better software that can be easily replicated to a DR server.