installing a sales related program at my office and ran into a problem. Called up the company and told the customer service about the error message, and he said it sounded like a permission problem, to make sure that the computer had administrative access to the network, and that he couldn’t help me because he didn’t know much about networks. Can anyone tell me how to make sure the computer has full read/write/etc… access to the network. Using Windows XP. Sorry if vague, I’m clueless about networks myself, just trying to save the boss $100-200 for something that may be easy to fix.
Does this program run as a service? If so, go to Services, and find the service for the program.
Highlight the service name and right-click. In the menu that appears, choose Properties.
Click on the LogOn tab and click on the radio button for This Account and enter in the Administrator login data.
Click OK and that should give it proper access.
Otherwise, have you done a Google search on the error you got? Someone else out there may have had the same problem and there will be directions on how to fix it…
I hate to be one of those people who drop in to a GQ thread and don’t answer the question you asked, but… Does your company have an IT staff, or is it a small operation where you’re providing your own IT support? If you have an IT staff, I encourage you to bring this up with them. It is likely that they have restricted the rights you have to your PC. In that case, you would need them to do the install.
As far as the network admin rights: I am kind of skittish of any application that requires network admin to work properly. Are you sure he didn’t mean that you needed local admin rights to do the install? If it requires admin rights to the network, your IT staff will probably be interested (read: horrified) to know that (again, assuming you have a regular IT staff).
This is bad practice and shouldn’t be encouraged. Setting applications to run under general purpose accounts is fine until a security audit mandates you to change the Administrator password and the app stops working seemingly randomly, often sometime after the password change.
It makes it evil to troubleshoot as there is often a delay between the cause (changing admin p/w) and effect (app stops working or functions improperly).
In this instance you should be using a service account; an account setup specifically to run this program.
Overall though this isn’t a good first troubleshooting step to take. The reason why there are so many data breaches, break-ins and so forth is due to too many applications running as administrator when lower privilege levels can be used.
You need to understand the problem before you can attempt to fix it and you’ve not got enough information from the vendor. “Administrator access to the network” is just a random collection of words. In the cases you are likely to encounter, you don’t have privilege levels on a network (ignoring QoS etc) - it’s all just beeps running over the wires.
I’d start by asking the vendor what rights the application needs on the machine it’s running on. Then find out if it’s meant to talk to another device across the network and whether there is any authentication required.
I understand you’re trying to save a few dollars here, but if you open your network to a breach, the few dollars saved now aren’t going to save your skin later.
t.
Do they mean administrative access to the entire network? That’s insane.
Administrative access to a folder on the network might be justifiable, but not by much. Well designed software should only require admin access when it’s being installed or uninstalled.
In any case, you’d have to discuss this with your system admin – and also with the software vendor, because there’s a good chance they don’t know what they’re talking about.
There are two ways to interpret this:
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Admin access to their workstation.
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Admin access to some network resource or firewall.
Without further information its really impossible to answer this.
And to add and make this clearer - in windows XP, computers don’t have admin access. Accounts have access.
The company where I used to work in Tech Support did this all the time. In fact, it was required for some of our programs to work, which is why I mentioned it. We never had any issues with security.
The company the OP called should have given him more information, but the post says he called “customer service”. To me that’s not quite the same thing as Technical Support and could be why he got such vague information.