Alex Scoble's IT Notes - An Information Technology Blog

Locking Down Ability To Print In Color

I've blogged before about our new Canon ImageRunner C6800. Like I said before, it's one of the few products out there that does fast black and white (68 ppm) and some color (16 ppm).

One problem that I've run into is that even though the Printing Defaults are set to print jobs in Black and White, some systems are still printing in color by default.

I've done research and can't find a way to force all jobs sent to a specific "printer" on our Windows 2003 print server to print in black and white.

I figure that if possible, best way of dealing with this is having two separate "printers" on the server. One that allows people to print in color and one that doesn't.

Appears that this is not possible though, with vanilla Windows Server 2003 and XP clients.

If anyone has a way to do this, drop me a line. Be much appreciated as color prints are 10 times more expensive for us on that machine than black and white.

Page File Size Settings in Windows for Systems With High Amounts of RAM?

The rule of thumb used to be that page file (both minimum and maximum to minimize fragmentation) should be twice the size of actual RAM.

These days, with servers routinely having 2 or more gigs of RAM, I find this size of a page file to be excessive.

I typically cap page file size at 1024MB regardless of physical RAM nowadays, however, I just saw a knowledgebase article on Veritas website that suggests that the page file should still be twice RAM.

Am I wrong in thinking that this is ridiculous and that your server will be on it's knees crawling long before it ever gets close to using that much pagefile?

If I am wrong and there are good documented reasons why pagefiles should still be double size of RAM, let me know.

Server Missing Remote Server Manager (appmgr.exe)

For some reason, the backup server/domain controller (DC) was missing Remote Server Manager (actual filename for the server is appmgr.exe).

This was screwing with our attempts to reinstall BE 9.1.

To get it reinstalled, I had to install Remote Administration (HTML) a component of World Wide Web Service which is a module of Internet Information Server (IIS) on Windows Server 2003.

Sounds like this module is needed by Backup Exec for the Remote Web Admin module to work.

Rights Issue On Windows Server 2000

In the last three weekends, one of our directories on our accounting server (the one that happens to hold all the data for our "time and billing" software) has changed to read-only access for all users.

It only happens once a week, but I can't figure out exactly what time, but seems to be sometime on Saturday night. Event viewer has not show much to shed light on the issue. About the only thing I have scheduled is a thorough virus file scan at 6am Sunday morning. I've turned that off on that server, so will have to see if that is the issue.

Pretty odd though as the rights "look" right in Windows Explorer on the server, but if I go to the folder in question and go to the Advanced Rights window and select for inherited rights to be reset, the problem goes away.

Anyhow, something to monitor.

Server 2003 Migration

Two weekends ago I migrated our file storage, print services, logon scripts and domain security from Novell 5.1 to Windows NT for domain, Kixtart for the logon script and Win Server 2003 for the file and print services.

My first impressions of Win Server 2003 are favorable even compared to Server 2000. So far it runs pretty well, is fast, stable and has some really nice features.

One great feature if you are using Server 2003 for file services is the shadow copy feature. It makes a copy of the shares on a volume at a specific interval that you set up. This way you can recover a file or folder using any of the available show copies. Novell does a similar thing but only allows you to recover from deleted files. Shadow copy allows you to quickly recover from any issue with a file or folder, barring complete array failure. So if you accidently write over a file, no problem. Erase a file, no problem. Corrupt a file, no problem.

So far that's the major feature that I've found to be useful that is new in 2003.

There are also some nice tweaks to security and the interface, but I will get into those at a later time.