Running on a VPN

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TPCoffice
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Nov 09, 2015 10:04 pm

Running on a VPN

Post by TPCoffice »

flcamarillo wrote:I recently ran the most recent maintenance update and now I'm not able to maintain list of employees in the payroll module. A box pops up that says "PC Plus needs to install updated run time files Computer administrator rights are required
click ok to continue or cancel to exit without installing" When I click on ok nothing happens same as when I click on cancel.

I need to go into maintain list of employees to make some changes. How do I fix the issue??
I recently ran into an issue just like this for our PC+ 11.55 system, but for a different reason. Here's what I did to fix it in case it helps someone else. If anyone knows of a better solution, please post!

Our offsite treasurer uses remote desktop over a VPN to reach an onsite office computer to enter financial data. For reliability, I made the server with the PowerChurch installation into a terminal server and redirected the remote desktop access there. The treasurer is a non-privileged user and everything worked fine until attempting to email the weekly reports. Clicking the email button produced the "PC Plus needs to install updated run time files" error.

From Task Manager, I traced this to PowerChurch running the pc115email.exe file in the Install folder. Thinking it was just a one-time run, I made the treasurer account administrator and everything ran normally without the installer launching at all. When the account was returned to non-privileged, the error returned, too. Something was being denied in Windows permissions.

Using the Microsoft/SysInternals Process Monitor utility, the permissions issue was traced to a series of registry keys with permissions that do not allow read access to a non-privileged user account. I granted Read access to "Authenticated Users" for these keys and the treasurer can now send emails as needed with the non-privileged account.

Since editing the registry can be complicated and not for the faint-of-heart, I won't attempt to explain this in detail, but the permissions on the following keys were modified (some, like FLPGRF, may be unrelated to the email, but they popped up in the search anyway):
HKey_Classes_Root\Chilkat_9_5_0.Email\CLSID
HKey_Classes_Root\Chilkat_9_5_0.Global
HKey_Classes_Root\Chilkat_9_5_0.Email
HKey_Classes_Root\Chilkat_9_5_0.Mailman
HKey_Classes_Root\Pcplus115.Helper
HKey_Classes_Root\FLPGRF.FlpGrfCtrl.1

There are lots of other Chilkat keys without non-privileged read access, but at least for the treasurer's tasks, they do not matter. A script could be written to simplify the process of changing those registry permissions although I did them one-by-one as the access denied errors popped up. While it would be nice to have a bug-fix created for this, but I suspect it's not a wide-spread problem.

NeilZ
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Joined: Wed Oct 08, 2003 1:20 am
Location: Dexter NM
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Re: Running on a VPN

Post by NeilZ »

As the previous post refers to Registry Keys that are specific to the VPN used, if you have different VPN software, it will probably have different keys.

That said, there are a number of ways you can provide the same access without using a VPN:

1. Use a dedicated computer that runs GoToMyPC, VNC or other desktop access software. The dedicated computer would have a user account that would be able to do everything needed.

2. Switch to Powerchurch Online which allows access to authorized users without having to use a local dedicated server or computer.
Neil Zampella

Using PC+ since 1999.

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