Friday 20 June 2008

Active directory permissions inheritance being cleared

I've been having an issue for some time where certain users and groups were having thier AD inheritance flag cleared and an arbitary set of permissions made.

It turns out that this is by design. Because the users belonged to a group, which belonged to Print Operators, thier permissions were being set to match the System\AdminSDHolder object. The PDC emulator runs an hourly process which copies the permissions from AdminSDHolder to these protected objects.

The following article describes how to remove Print Operators from this protected list of groups. The article talks about a hotfix, but this is only relevent for Windows 2003 SP1. Windows 2003 SP2 already has this change.

You can find the article here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817433/en-us

Sunday 15 June 2008

A couple of great Media Center addons


Just wanted to share a couple of excellent Media Center addons I have found recently
.
The first, called WebGuide4, allows you to access your Media Center PC through a web interface, including mobile:
http://www.asciiexpress.com/wiki/

The second allows access to BBC iPlayer, ITV Catch Up and Channel 4 Catch Up from within Media Center:
http://www.milliesoft.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9&Itemid=11

DPM 2007 Agent failing to protect Windows Vista SP1

I recently modifed my DPM 2007 installation to backup my local users folder on Windows Vista Ultimate x64. This would not work and kept producing the following event logs when I attemted to manually sync the share:
Log Name:      Application
Source:        Application Error
Date:          15/06/2008 08:50:37
Event ID:      1000
Task Category: (100)
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      Cartman2.thefoleyhouse.co.uk
Description:
Faulting application DPMRA.exe, version 2.0.5820.0, time stamp 0x46f990f7, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x4791ada5, exception code 0x80070002, fault offset 0x000000000002649d, process id 0x1ff8, application start time 0x01c8cebaac1ac7c8.
After some research I found the following fix:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/31450629/cant-create-recovery-poi.aspx

You have to create the following DWORD registry key with a value of 1:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\kernel\obcaseinsensitive

Saturday 14 June 2008

Windows Vista Ultimate x64 Component Registration Problem

My Media Center PC randomly decided to stop working. After a lot of searching and trying I finally found this:

http://mymce.wordpress.com/2006/11/30/a-component-registration-failurea-critical-process-failurea-tuner-not-found-error/

The steps were:

  1. Close Media Center
  2. Click on the Start menu, choose run and type cmd
  3. Execute the command regsvr32.exe atl.dll
  4. Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehSched /unregServer
  5. Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehSched /service
  6. Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehRecvr /unregServer
  7. Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehRecvr /service
  8. Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehRec.exe /unregServer
  9. Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehRec.exe /regserver
  10. Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehmsas.exe /unregServer
  11. Execute the command C:\WINDOWS\eHome\ehmsas.exe /regserver
  12. Restart Media Center

Thanks so much guys!