Post SP2 Shortcut issue

[Teth]

Hello all first post. I'm a 24 yearold IT technician in a grammar school in Belfast 5 months in the job so far and enjoying the challenge and freedom compared with the low end corporate posts I've previously held.

 

In my spare minutes I have been preparing the rollout of our schools first new machines in 5 years. Our best current generation network is a 2k server with 2k + winsuite clients which was done a long time ago when I was a pupil at the school now I'm back 5 months in the job as technician.

 

a few weeks into the job I was asked to purchase 2 new suites worth of machines + servers to refresh the eldest of the schools systems. They have been boxed up until recently when I have installed 2k3 servers and started setting up everything to do an AD only secure academic network. Everything has gone great but I have aniggle that is probably going to be a registry hack to fix. I'm using mandatory profiles for students and the majority of teachers with roaming profiles for myself and a the IT teachers with the desktops and mydocuments folders mapped to home directories on the file server. When you click any desktop, quicklaunch or start menu shortcut you the the "this shortcut is in a remote location and could be potentially harmful. Run / Cancel" How do I stop this happening because it is obviously not a desirable behaviour on the desktop.

 

Also while I'm typing. Encarta 2006 premium came in our schools agreement for the new software and I've done the admin install to a shared server folder and I can manually install a client with the setup.exe but I'd really rather have the client deployed by group policy as over the summer I'll be adding various legacy networks around the school into this domain. Has anyone had any success creating an MSI of this client install or is there an MS resource kit for it that I'm not finding on they're site. I've tried making an MSI with admin studio but it fails to properly invoke the .net 1.1 installer and encarta wont continue without it.

[ChrisH]

Install .net first seperately? Not sure about you other issue but here is the listings of all GPO settings. Have a scan through that and see if there is anything that could be causing the problems.

[Teth]

THanks for the reply I should have said the machines already have .net on and up to date though a WSUS server. The encarta install still insists on trying to start its bundled .net installer anyway. I assume to verify the version or install state.

 

The network install document wants you to execute setup.exe /i /q is there perhaps a way to have a GPO execute that once only for each machine when they first join the network? Only "easy" alternative I see at the moment is to add it to the RIS image before I deploy that to the rest f the machines but I'd always heard that you should install the minumum working system before using riprep and then add the rest based on OUs by GPO.

[ChrisH]

You could maybe execute that cmd line and use the Windows Installer Wrapper Wizard

 

When you say the machines are all upto date do they have 1.1 and 2 or just 2?

[Teth]

1.1 and 2 think there could be a conflict? The way I understood it was that 2 was different rather than being a replacement. I'll check the machine in detail tmr and see if it has both or if it upgraded the 1.1 to 2.

[ChrisH]

I had just 2 originally on my last build but had to stick 1.1 on for the SATs pilot but they work ok together.

[alan-d]

aI'm using mandatory profiles for students and the majority of teachers with roaming profiles for myself and a the IT teachers with the desktops and mydocuments folders mapped to home directories on the file server. When you click any desktop, quicklaunch or start menu shortcut you the the "this shortcut is in a remote location and could be potentially harmful. Run / Cancel" How do I stop this happening because it is obviously not a desirable behaviour on the desktop.

 

I've a feeling this is a trust issue between your servers, but I could be totally wrong as it's late and my brain has gone to sleep - I'll check up on it in the morning when I get a minute.

 

Oh btw - welcome

[_Bob_]

You can get around the shortcut issue by using hostnames instead of full dns names i.e

\\server\share\shortcut.lnk

instead of

\\server.network.com\share\shortcut.lnk

When XP sees a DNS name it assumes it's a foreign network and panics a bit.

[Teth]

I'm already using hostnames and being an old school trained netware user and a bit paranoid I have the servers and admin workstations configured with them.

 

I looked at the spreadsheet posted earlier for adm templates and theres a couple of settings in the SP2 one related to security center that don't seem familiar. First thing tomorrow I'm going to check and then update to SP2 specific ones if neccessary. What isn't made clear is if they are backwards compatible. Is anything removed by using a higher version that would for example affect 2k clients left on the network.

[ChrisH]

No they are fine I still have 2000 clients and nothing is affected. They XP ones that are XP only or SP2 just dont take effect.

[Teth]

I got time to solve the shortcut problem at last this morning. I'd have preferred a solution that turned it off totally but one didn't seem to exist but in the absence of that adding the hostnames of the servers containing the shortcuts to the IE trusted sites list using domain policy had the desired effect. Users are no longer prompted to aprove the opening of files. All being well after break I'll have time to get encarta deployed too!