René's ICT Notepad

Everyone knows all about it: annoying software. Annoying behaviour, irritating interface, updates three times a week, software that you just did not ask for... Read all about the joys of software we really do not need at http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000001048,39419834,00.htm . Especially brilliant is their quote on Norton Antivirus: It's a little unfair to pick on Norton Antivirus and make it carry the sins of half the desktop malware industry — but only a little unfair. If ever a class of software deserved to be cast into the lower reaches of Hell and run on Satan's own desktop, it is this. Performance- sapping, space-hogging, noisy, irritating and prone to inducing just as many problems as they purport to solve, these horrible, ineffective, expensive lumps of digital thuggery keep entire platoons of support engineers in business and home users in tears. We know. We get the phone calls. Also read the truth about Microsoft Outlook and Exchange and a lot of other

Last week, really spent some good time troubleshooting why LPT1 could not be mapped to a network printer queue. In this case, a user could use "net use lpt1 \\server1\printershare1" on this local machine, but not on the terminal server. Login script was fine, everything went fine, except for mapping the LPT1-port. Turned out that the user had Administrative rights on the local machine, and was just a "Domain user" on the terminal server. (Whether this is good or bad is out of scope for this post... :-)) Did some googling, and first came up with this one: " Unable to Map (Net Use) LPT1 in Windows XP ". After reading some more, it turned out that M$ itself has a knowledge base article on this: " Non-administrators cannot remap an LPT port to a network printer ". Different from what Microsoft says, I have found this issue only to occur for LPT1; other local ports can be mapped to network shares without a problem... Regards, Rene