Sidestepping managed service

I've recently taken over as technician at a secondary school. The school has a managed service agreement with the local authority, which takes care of the network infrastructure and the domain. Unfortunately, this means that I'm completely cut off from group policy management, DNS, DHCP and a host of other things that ideally I'd want access to.

The idea is that if we want a change to the system, we submit a request and receive feedback on it. This usually means no. Nothing can be installed on the domain controller or file server, either.

Because we hold all our own licenses, I've been toying with the idea of buying a new server, and creating a new domain in front of the other one. The trouble arrises when you take into account user creation, which is done by sims and fed automatically into the AD.

Is this idea feasible?

Which secondary? You're not under Telford and Wrekin are you? We had that setup until very recently..

Nope, in South Wales. The management here really aren't keen on opting out of the managed service, either.

Basically, the machines that are already here need to stay here.

If the school doesn't want to opt out then in your position all you can really do is continue as you are.

Otherwise they need to opt out but buy the hardware that's in place?

Ben

Everything except the servers most likely. That's including switches, UPS, etc.

It's looking more likely that we'll have to continue along this path for the time being. Ah well, I'll just have to find little compromises and rebel against the system whenever I can :)

Much like the situation here. No control of the domain stuff, dns, dhcp, gpo, cant add computers unless they are managed ones. It has its advantages though...if its broke its not my fault :)

Have a look at http://softulz.net/products.shtml its handy tool :) Took a while to pick our 184 managed PCs out of the whole LEA domain and sort them in to groups but once you have them sorted its easy enough to do normal things like install software, copy files to a group of PCs.

I'm having a play with it now. Apparently you can also image machines remotely, too. Can't find any options to do this though, so any ideas?