Pastel on Windows 2000: Persistence

Pastel is an accounting package for the Win32 platform. Version 5 was originally written for either Windows 3.1 or WIndows 95: it seems to be a 16-bit application. Running this on Windows 2000 should be straight forward, if you are prepared to give users access to the Power Users user group on the workstation.

Lets add a little spice to this problem. I'm going to use Samba 2.2.2 (or newer, perhaps) as a Primary Domain Controller for authenticating the users ont he network and giving them access to the shared files. Pastel does multi-user by file sharing: samba is a damn fine file server for SMB protocols, and can be a PDC as well.

However, as at Samba 2.2.2, there are only two groups that Domain Users may be in: Administrators, and Users. Not Power Users.

So the task was this: get Pastel to run for standard Users.

The problem with this is file and registry key permissions: these are undocumented, and Pastel are either unwilling to tell me what these should be, or don't know; its hard to tell with their confusion. I am hoping someone at Pastel will see this page, and correct any mistakes here: God know that phoning and emailing them has failed to extract the right information!

BTrieve

Pastel uses Btrieve microkernel as a back-end. So we must make this accessible as well. There are two parts to check: Registry keys and system DLLs.

In watching the %WINDOWS%/system directory during the install, I found that Btrieve installed the following files:

These files should be readable and executable where required for all users on the domain.

The registry keys are in HKLM/Software/Btrieve Technologies. This should have full access to everyone on the domain.

Next, Pastel permissions. Find the Pastel directory (possibly Pas5) and change that to be accessible to all users on the domain. Make the executables to be executable for all users on the domain.

to be continued...