Windows DFS shares, junctions and permissions

Here's another one that caught me out today, but I've never come across before.

Under a DFS share, any linked shares are created as junctions. It appears that the permissions on these junctions do affect the permissions of the data within the linked share. Whilst this is logical, given how junction points work, what really threw me was that the wonderful, wonderful GUI didn't reflect this and the permissions on the junction point had been inadvertently changed.

It's not like you ever need another reason to chalk one up for the command line, but there we go!

Specifying a driver, for redirected printers

I guess I've not come across this before as most of the printers we deploy use the same driver name for client side and server side drivers, but it appears that you can force a Terminal Server to use a certain driver, in place of what the client is telling the server.

KB239088 details the process. I found that the wizard wasn't much use at all - but it's not like the process is particularly complicated. Doing it manually also demonstrates that deploying the "fix" over multiple servers is childs play.

As 64 bit Terminal Servers become more common, and clients with printers stay at 32 bit (i.e. home or remote workers) I can see this becoming more relevant over the next few years.

Never trust a computer scientist

This popped up on the Bath and Bristol LUG mailing list a few days ago, from Shevek, and I thought it was pretty "cute" -

Scientific method is the process of experimentation and observation. Computer science is therefore defined as "Let's try it and see if it works." Computing, on the other hand, is doing it, knowing that it will work. Never trust a computer scientist.