Windows

In the Windows world, moving an application can be a real pain.  Thanks to reliance on the registry, it can sometimes be easier to reinstall an application than to move it from one internal drive to another.  Of course, Mac users have no problem with this concept - even before OS X.  Want an app in a different location?  Just drag-and-drop it where you want it.  Of course, on a corporate network, you may be restricted to where you run an app from.  However, this run-from-anywhere mentality extends to removable media, including USB flash ("thumb") drives.

I want to chronicle this in the case someone runs into it in the future.  To begin with, this post very specifically refers to OS X Server, so, if you're seeing this message, and you're joining to a real Windows server or other Samba server, this isn't the answer.

Every few months I need to update a Terminal Server or Citrix box to login, by default, to a particular Windows Domain.  Every few months just isn't enough to sear the info into my brain.  So here, for my benefit as much as anyones, is how to change the default domain that Windows logs into.  Of course, we're headed for the registry.  Run regedit and dive down:

HKLM
SOFTWARE
  Microsoft
  Windows NT
    Current Version
    Winlogon

(I'd take a screenshot, but we're buried a little too deep this time)

OK, so this is a reminder for me as much as anyone else. Every few months, a Windows server that I'm responsible for has the Print Spooler die. "Die" as in, won't start up. The crummy thing about this is that the problem is typically confined to a single queue, but all printers on the system are affected. This is even more frustrating when it happens on a Citrix server, as anyone with an ICA session won't "see" any printers. You'll notice in "Services" that the Print Spooler Service is stopped. Also, you'll see an error in Event Viewer that looks like this:

I’ve had a number of people ask me what the problem is with XP machines joining a Windows domain that is hosted on an OS X Tiger-based PDC. Personally, I never ran into any problems…until now.

I set up a test machine running OS X Server 10.4, and immediately got it up to 10.4.1. I made it an OD master, got Kerberos running, and set up Windows services. Tried to join my test XP box (read: game machine) to the domain. I immeditely got rejected: “Windows can’t find the SRV record for the domain radiotope.com…”.