[butchfoote]

We just added an iMac G5 (PPC) to our network (PB G3 and flatpanel iMac). Both of those Macs have MS Office - 98 on the G3 and Office v.X on the iMac FP.

We 'transferred' all of the apps from the iMac FP to the iMac G5. They all run with personal file sharing on. The iMac FP hosts an external backup drive and Epson printer for the others. Our network is a local net on a Linksys router out to the Net via cable modem.

One of the first things we noticed was that when we are running an Office application on one of the iMacs, the other iMac cannot launch ANY Office Application.

This is very inconvenient! How does the Office code do this?

Thanks

[Eriamjh]

Office checks for other copies of Office on the same subnet using the same serial number. I forget what ports it uses, but search the net and you should be able to find it. There is a command using terminal that can block it, but you are not supposed to use the same copy of Office on multiple machines.

[butchfoote]

Thanks for the information and advice. I found that it was port 2222 and the command was recommended to be: sudo ipfw add deny udp from any to any 2222.

Microsoft also put out a patch that accomplishes the same thing in another way to fix the problem that their authentication scheme leaves your system exposed to denial of service attacks among other nasties.

The Microsoft linke is http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sec.../MS02-002.mspx

[butchfoote]

Actually it looks like you can do the equivalent of the sudo ipfw through System Preferences Sharing.