Faxmaker is an excellent product that I work with, but it is also expensive. When I ran into some issues with my Faxmaker server (I think it was more modem driver issues, but whatever), I decided to investigate other options instead of renewing/upgrading. That’s when I came across Hylafax+.

My workplace uses Faxmaker for 3 things: email-to-fax, fax-to-email, and PDF-to-fax. After some reading, Hylafax will do all of this as well, so I’m going to document the entire conversion process.

For now, I’m going to cover my initial setup of Hylafax to use a MultiTech MT5634 modem board to receive incoming faxes and send them to users as a PDF attachment.

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Tags: grlug, hylafax, linux

Last time, I posted about some leftover permission issues for FlowerCo and the Enterprise Admins group.  Today, I will explain how to remove Symantec from all the workstations in the domain. Most of this comes from this awesome post by Locutus, and if I could send this guy a beer over the internet, I would.

FlowerCo’s Symantec rollout is a combination of a misconfigured old central server, a new central server with no managed clients, and workstations that are all unmanaged clients. The great thing about this is that none of the clients are managed, so there isn’t any password needed to remove them from the workstations, which makes this a lot simpler. The bad thing about this is that the clients are all running the full endpoint protection suite, so remotely uninstalling them will briefly disconnect them from the network.  Don’t run this command during business hours unless you like having your phone suddenly ring off the hook.

Find the GUID for Symantec’s uninstall command (it’ll be buried somewhere in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Uninstall), then from a machine logged on as Domain Admin, run the following command (you’ll need the PsTools suite from SysInternals):

psexec \\* MsiExec.exe /norestart /q/x{FB8A4E30-9915-4814-ADF9-42E00D9FDC3D} REMOVE=ALL

This will run the uninstall command on every machine in the domain. The /norestart should be obvious, the /q makes the uninstall silent, and the /x enables logging. You can substitute other installer GUIDs to uninstall those products too.

This does not remove LiveUpdate.

Tags: flowerco, psexec, symantec, uninstall

If you have a spreadsheet that has cell protection on it, and you can’t even select the cells to copy and paste them into another workbook, here’s an easy way around it. Upload the spreadsheet to Google Docs. Their spreadsheet program will remove the protection. You can then export the file from Google as XLS and open it in Excel, without the protection.

The formatting may be a bit different, and you might lose some macro functions, but it should get most everything. I have not tried it with a password protected Excel sheet yet.

Tags: excel, google

Say your AD root is ’smashcorp.local’, and you have a child domains of ‘flowerco.smashcorp.local’ and ‘oilchange.smashcorp.local’  The oilchange domain was migrated into your AD directly from NT4, while the flowerco domain was already AD, so a new DC was created for it and it was kind of ‘copied’ into the smashcorp forest.

If you are a member of the Enterprise Admins group of smashcorp, you might notice that while you can manage oilchange just fine, flowerco throws some strange permissions errors (like being able to delete but not create GPOs) and is always nagging you for a password for operations. Running a dcdiag from a smashcorp DC gives you “failed test NetLogons” errors, and access denied errors on Services, frssysvol, frsevent, kccevent, and Systemlog.

After scratching my head over this for a couple of days, and getting tired of RDPing into flowerco, I finally found where Enterprise Admins was missing from flowerco. In AD Sites & Services, go into the Builtin folder and add Enterprise Admins to the Administrators group. Apparently this didn’t happen with the way flowerco was brought into the forest initially.

Tags: active directory, enterprise, flowerco, netlogon, oilchange, windows