GPO or Third Party Solution

[edsa]

Hello all, I am planning a new network for a high school in the summer. It would be good to get some opinions on wheather a normal GPO combined with a mandatory user profile or a third party software solution is the best way to go for a lockdown of the students PCs.

 

I need to make the environment as secure and tight as possible. I would like to try and stick to a normal xp desktop and only allow access to Internet Explorer, home folder, allowed programs from the start menu. I have tested some GPOs, but it doesn't seem to let you get tight enough.

 

cheers

 

e

[ajbritton]

Welcome Edsa,

 

I would humbly suggest you try searching the forums as this topic has been covered many times in the past.

 

You will find that there is a polarisation of opinion between so called 'vanilla' setups which utilitse the capabilities of Windows that you mention (Group Policy, Roaming/Mandatory Profiles, WDS/RIS) and the third party solutions (RM, Viglen etc).

 

Anything is possible with either setup, but it all depends on your level of expertise and the amount of time you can spend learning the required techniques.

 

The fact that you have to ask the question suggests that you may not feel confident to go ahead with a fully vanilla setup, but if you wanted to do so, you have come to the right place for support and assistance!

 

For myself, I would go with a vanilla setup as follows

- Windows 2003 Server with Active Directory

- Group Policies to manage/control PCs / user environment

- Mix of roaming/mandatory profiles as appropriate

- Custom logon scripts as required

- RIS/WDS for PC builds

[rlculver]

Hi,

 

This is exactly what I would like to setup

 

Had a meeting today and feel that a 'custom' network setup will work much better.

 

How long did it take you ajbritton to setup your server?

 

Just installed windows 2003 server tonight

[Ric_]

@edsa: Welcome and i hope you find the forums (and community) helpful. I suggest you have a read of the wiki (see left hand menu) where some of this is discussed with HOWTOs.

 

@rlculver: Glad you are finding the community helpful. again, read the wiki so that you can get yourself familiarised. Just to let you know, I did a complete migration from RM Connect 2.4 (Win NT4 and Win98 clients) to full thin client in one summer - migrating user data to a SAN and muCH more. If you are starting from scratch and just going for plain old fat clients you can probably do it in a week (give yourself a month to tweak though0.

 

@ALL: Cold you please add your locations (county if UK, country if not) so that we have a rough idea where you are. You never know who is just down the road and might offer to help out. I found out that one of the barmen in my local is the junior tech at my old high school on Sunday! It also helps us to gague the best places to hold conferences and the like

[webman]

We run a CC3 network (which a quick search for CC3 on here will bring up many threads on this) - our users are locked down so tight they can barely breathe

[edsa]

Thanks for othe replies, I can see I will be a regular visitor to this site.

[daveyboy]

Netware 6.5 + ZenWorks

[snrweb]

Think of Ranger as a half-way point between vanilla at one end and CC3 at the other.

 

Have a good techie demo of Ranger and see where in that line you and your site want to be.