Hi,
I recently installed a new Win7 professional SP1 PC. This PC is member of a Windows 2008 R2-Domain. I have some portable apps on a network-share which always worked on my old XP-machine. These are firefox, miranda and thunderbird.
I can start the apps alright but neighter of them seem to can connect. When I want to go to http://google.com with FF nothing happens. There is no error or something, the tab just stays blank.
Same with miranda and thunderbird. No connection, no error. This also applies to the local network (e.g. a local mailserver for thunderbird)
I already deactivated the firewall for testing purposes without any success.
Interestingly everything works as expected, if I copy the apps to a local drive.
Does anybody experience the same behaviour? What can I do about it?
Regards,
Stephan
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Hi,
I still have this problem but did some investigation. This is becoming stranger every minute.
This all happens only, if I am logged in with restricted userrights. If I run my portable apps from network share as domain-administrator, everything works fine.
When I log out the administrator and log in my restricted user, there is no network connection within portable apps.
Now it gets really strange: Still logged in as restricted user but running my portable app using "run as administrator", I can get a connection. If I quit the portable app an run it as restricted user after that again, I get the connection.
I can't imagine, nobody is in the same situation. There has to be a way. Any thoughts on that?
Regards,
Stephan
Not that I can say with any certainty, but this sounds more like an issue with the networked computer's user account than anything that could be fixed by PortableApps.
Can you connect with a normal install of Firefox from a restricted user account over your network share? My guess is you probably can't, but it would be helpful to know.
Hi,
thanks for your reply. What do you mean by "Can you connect with a normal install of Firefox from a restricted user account over your network share"?
I can not install a normal Firefox on a network share.
When I copy the portable apps files to a local disk, everything works fine, but this is surely not what you meant.
Not only I have this issue. This is reproducable for every user around here.
Can you give it a try? I think this is easy to check for anybody within an AD.
regards,
Stephan
Now I tried it within a blank virtual machine. Just Windows 7 x64. No Domain, no AD. Connected to a network share, started firefox portable and nothing.
Tabs stay white. Seems as there is a security-setting or anything. Feels like some kind of sandboxed mode.
Regards,
Stephan
This is getting more mysterious any minute.
I tried to connect to a Windows 2003 Server. From there, I could run my portable apps as wished. Everything works fine.
So my guess is now, that this is related to some new SMB-protocol which is used by Windows 7 when connecting to Server 2008 R2.
The question is now, how to fix this.
Regards,
Stephan
I've spent a lot of time fiddling with this, too. I've tested from 2008R2 to 7, XP, and 2000. And from XP & 2000 to all of the above. Only under 2000 & XP as servers does the problem resolve itself. Either that, or when I explicity deactivate SMB2 on the server (see below).
As I see it, there are two possibilities:
1) You can disable SMB2 as per the instructions here:
http://www.petri.co.il/how-to-disable-smb-2-on-windows-vista-or-server-2...
This has problems, though, since you lose a lot of the advanced features.
That, and your performance drops - in some cases a LOT (I saw a 3x transfer speed drop).
2) Create a VHD file, store it on the network, and mount it locally on the machine.
This approach, so far as I can, has worked absolutely flawlessly.
From an elevated prompt, do:
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Windows\system32>diskpart
Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7601
Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: XXXXXX
DISKPART> create vdisk file=Z:\portable.vhd type=expandable maximum 16000
100 percent completed
DiskPart successfully created the virtual disk file.
DISKPART>
Once you have it ready, just go into disk management, attach it, then prepare it as if it were any other hard drive. Once formatted, you can then start getting your portable apps set up.
Hi,
thanks for that. This seems to work quite well. But I have another solution which does not require administrative rights.
1. copy portable apps to the lokal drive
2. copy data to the network-share (e.g. home drive of the user)
3. put the respective ini-file to the root of the app
4. point profile directories to the network share
This way, data will be safe and accessible from any machine. If you set up any machine and any user with the same directory structure, the data should be there regardless which computer you log in to.
Best regards,
Stephan
Hi,
today I tried my own suggestion. It did not work because I can not set absolute paths in the respective ini: https://portableapps.com/node/27326
Too bad!
Stephan