Permission Nightmares

  • Thread starter Thread starter Plastic Man
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Plastic Man

We thought we were being clever setting up all users on our SBS 2000 network
to be clients of our domain. We erased everyone's local client accounts and
essentially stripped away any admin rights from the client users. We now no
longer have to worry about people installing errant programs or changing
computer settings.

HOWEVER, we now get grief every time someone tries to print to a network
printer. Either we don't find it while browsing the network or once
installed via an Administrator logon, the non-administrator user of the
client station cannot use the printer.

Other problems include many messages about not being able to write to C for
mundane things like saving the MS Office document settings (normal.dot) and
the like.

Does anyone have a suggestion for setting some priviledges for our client
users that will deal with these messages? Please tell me I can do it all
from the server machine.

Plastic Man
 
Plastic Man said:
Does anyone have a suggestion for setting some priviledges for our client
users that will deal with these messages? Please tell me I can do it all
from the server machine.
Click to expand...

Don't mutipost to a dozen and a half newsgroups!!! Post to the relevant
ones only!! This has nothing to do with ISA Server.

But since I'm the kind of guy I am, I'll give at least a little bit of an
answer.....

Some things you can do from the server, some things you can't and must do on
the local machine,...some things are the way it is supposed to be.

Printers.
A printer accessed directly across a network via the network card in the
printer is *not* a network printer, it is a *local* printer using a TCP/IP
Port instead of an LPT port. Normal users aren't allowed to install local
printers, but they are allowed to install Network Printers which are
printers that are "shared" by another machine. However normal users can't
install the drivers, so the Admin must install the printer first so the
driver is on the machine, then the users can add their own network printers
if they use the existing driver.

When the Admin installs local (and TCP/IP) printers, the printer should be
available to everyone already.

Normal users are not allowed to write to the root of "C" and many folders
below that, but that shouldn't effect Office unless Office wasn't installed
properly. Office should be installed by a Domain Admin. The Office Apps
should be fine, but I have seen issues with poorly designed speadsheets that
had VBA scripting that expected to write a temp file to the Root of C and
the path and filename was "hardcoded". To solve that I had to give normal
users the ability to write to the Root of C because the "developer" of the
speadsheet wasn't available to grab by the neck.
 
yes... there are like 500 newsgroups for this simple question... you can
install network printers... what you should do is set a network share with
all print drivers and install all printers per user and set it up in their
roaming profile.

also, you can simply share a normal.dot and just use file locations in
office to point to the correct .dot file so that the users does not need to
use their root.

as far as doing it all from the server???? good luck. you could install
ghost server, create a legit image.. and push it out on the network... as
far as getting away from this ... issue, without doing some work... good
chance.
 
We thought we'd done what you described with the printer installs, but many
of our client users are still calling with printing issues.

The normal.dot problem I've been told happens in Word only, not Excel. I
will take the advice about the .DOT file, though, as everyone has Word set
up just a bit different, isn't a single shared file going to cause a
problem?

From what I've been reading about root drive permissions, I've come to be
aware that, yes, I will be requiring several more jogs around the work site.

Plastic Man
 
First, I am not an expert, but Yes, each Word user should have their own
copy of Normal.dot.
Once the template becomes corrupted (and it will), Word will create a
new one and all Macro's, customizations etc. will be lost.
Learned from (sad) experience.
--
Regards;
Rob
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The normal.dot problem I've been told happens in Word only, not Excel. I
will take the advice about the .DOT file, though, as everyone has Word set
up just a bit different, isn't a single shared file going to cause a
problem?
Click to expand...
<snip>
 
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