The Best School Network

[azrael78]

The manglement: Well there's always that SCCM, SCOM but they, especially the second one, appear to need dedicated staff (who do nothing else) to figure out and use.

I haven't tried SCCM but I'm running SCOM and I've figured it out for the most part and I HAVE to do other things... but SCOM is a complicated beast. But once it's mostly in and working, you can more or less leave it to it's own devices and make checking the alerts part of a daily maintenance task.

(We are almost at that part - yay)

Az

[budgester]

My imaging process is near perfection - one F12 to boot, one enter to confirm, and an hour later it's ready for login with all software, drivers, etc (the image is empty, software is all done on demand so I can move a machine from art to music without a problem).

How do you do this ?

[powdarrmonkey]

How do you do this ?

WDS to deploy an image, careful manipulation of sysprep to pull in the right drivers, and lots of post-install registry hackery to do things like install management software, set some options, manage a couple of reboots and trigger software installation. Oh, and active directory pre-staging to allow automatic naming.

It used to have an extra step - presenting a pendrive with the wireless settings during postinstall - but now we have radius that comes from group policy, so that extra step is replaced with coffee now.

The image itself takes about 15 minutes to pull, sysprep about another five and software installation between 20 and 40, after which there's a final reboot and the user sees a normal login screen.

[gshaw]

You can't afford the hardware.

The manglement: Well there's always that SCCM, SCOM but they, especially the second one, appear to need dedicated staff (who do nothing else) to figure out and use.

I've had SMS for what feels like ages now and still trying to convince myself I want SCCM, eventually it'll have to be upgraded... hopefully before the next imaging cycle

Also got SCOM at the last Campus Agreement renewal... beefy bit of kit that I started putting on but had to leave for now as we've lost a tech and generally had a mental summer here... really want to get it sorted though as I've got two 22" TFTs mounted on the wall just waiting for a pretty network status map to be permanently on display