I'd check their web-site again. It has been available for free for at least a few weeks now. With a nice little bug that wouldn't let you power on your vms .... but thats fixed now. depending on what you're going to do with it there are a number of alternatives. Virtual Server or 2008 for microsoft. xen, or qemu for linux. And VMware Server which runs on top of Linux or Windows

http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html[^] SyncBack is a nice program and even the free version is very useful, and has pretty good logging too to see what happened. We use it where I work all the time. The choking and dying could be due to permissions on the profile folders.

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Configuring-Windows-Server-2003-act-NAT-router.html[^] Maybe this is the article you should be following.

Norton ... as in Symantec ??? I vote for all of the above. I had to call them the other week to try to resolve an issue with their software (Backup Exec System Recovery), little to say I would rather have a tooth extraction than deal with them. I wouldn't recommend anything by that company for any purpose to anybody.

Personally I have not run into any problems with SP2. I manage quite a few Windows 2003 Servers and I have not run into a problem. If you're worried about driver compatibility you can research that with the vendor that the server came from, or if a custom built you can look into individual components. I personally would never configure a domain controller to have DNS point to anything but itself or another internal DNS server. I would not point a DC to an external DNS server. Pointing clients to another DNS server is probably alright, although if you configure DNS to use forwarders for external queries it isn't really necessary. You might not be doing this, you said only clients, so that might not be relevant. Can you access the internet when the DNS Server Service is stopped? IE ... telnet to port 25 or 80 of some external server that you reference by IP address, thus bypassing DNS resolution all together?

The clients default gateway is the IP or the interal NIC on the server right? a ping isn't really that good a test either, especially pinging external IPs. Haven't done this with Windows, but having setup PIXs and ASAs I'm not sure you want to enable NAT on the private interface. You want to NAT traffic from your internal LAN out through the public interface, but I'm not sure if this would be accomplished by enabling NAT on the private interface in Windows or not. Just out of curiosity if you type: "route print" at the command line, does it show 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 to have the gateway for external traffic? Any reason your not just using a Linksys or similar box to perform this?

I would update to Service Pack 2 first of all, there is always the chance that will solve the problem, plus probably better of at SP 2 anyway if at all possible. Are there any errors in the event logs related to the DNS service? Is all DNS name resolution on the network failing or just Internet related queries? I probably wouldn't point to a virus for this problem, although its tough to say from your description. Up to date virus signatures and a full scan are never a bad idea though. You may want to try reinstalling DNS if updating to SP 2 doesn't help. (If you only have one DNS server and you're using Active Directory you might want to look for a MS document on how they say to do this, if there is one.)

Yes it is possible to do this. You can map a drive directly across the internet provided the firewall is configured correctly. If you don't have a firewall running and both machines are plugged straight into the modem ... It is unusual that I do anything like this, however if I need to do it I normally setup an access list that allows all IP traffic from one IP to the other. Obviously this is quite a bit easier if you have static IPs. If you have a PIX / ASA and need help with the access list just reply and I can give you an example.

I recently discovered a remote access product that I like a lot. It's called mRemote and its an open-source project. Has a tabbed view and lets you do SSH, VNC, RDP, Telnet and some other connections. Useful if you use Windows on the desktop and need to connect via RDP or SSH to a number of machines. Uses putty as the ssh client. http://www.mremote.org/wiki/ Running Ubuntu mostly.

Well its still kind of vague at this point. Basically a personal website to mess around with and use for learning. I know that each of them can do what the others can do to some extent, but MediaWiki is a better wiki than Drupal, and Drupal is a better CMS than MediaWiki. If you were going to pick one that a site could grow into depending on requirements in the future, which would you recommend? But to throw some requirements out there to give a starting point: Something to keep track of games scores / results, basic forum and blog support, RSS, and can plug into either MySQL or PostgreSQL. Also the lighter it is on resources the better. I plan on running it with Lighttpd and not Apache. I'd prefer one written in PHP, but if it's Python and has enough of a difference to justify trying it out I'd give it a shot. But any thoughts on which ones handle plug ins and extensions better than others, upgrades, migrations etc.. Any input on one vs. the other that I won't notice until I've used it for six months.

I've been looking to setup a CMS / Wiki / Blogging software to create a new website and was wondering if anybody had any favorites. I'm really looking for something extensible and relatively easy to add functionality to. Obviously there are the big ones, Drupal, Joomla, MediaWiki ... Anyone have any preferences?