_techie_

I think I repackaged it...although I do remember running it from a network share as a test, seemed to work okay! Thanks,

Just to add, you can use the boot.wim, install.wim, and Windows 7 "Product".clg files with WDS to install using PXE, and WDS. We have the same upgrade disk for Win 7 Pro (x86) and have successfully made a machine unattend install, just having a problem logging on after doing a domain join at present (something about a trust relationship) but so far its great! HTH Mark

I know that this is not too helpful, but yo can use VEEAM (sp?) with ESXi (free) to backup complete servers to another server. We use Veritas here, and I like it. I even find it easy to search through the catalogs now to find instances of people files and to restore a working version. With VEEAM you can also do file level restore when VMware player is installed from the image you have captured. vmware player is free I think. You could use vertias to backup the VEEAM backup files to tape to take off-site. HTH HTH

Thanks for your help. It appears that I was using Pro...maybe I will look into obtaining Enterprise then, or see if we are licensed for it... With regards to the modem driver issue, I looked at HP's website again at the drivers for the device. They were updated yesterday (I hadn't checked this until tonight), so might be worth a look to see if the new drivers is now signed or sorts the issue. I also found out to see if the drivers that get imported into MDT 2010, are also WHQL certified, which is a nice feature. Cheers,

Hi all, After muchos fiddling this week (its half term after all!), we have setup our Server 2008 x64 box with both WDS (in normal (win7 & vista) modes), MDT 2010, and WAIK and started to get a feel for it. We would be rolling out 'new computer' installations using MS terminology always, not upgrades or refreshes etc, since we are a very "hot-desking" environment, and all docs are stored on the server, with mandatory profiles for both staff and students. Following the excellent IT Idiots guide on creating an unattended Lite Touch installation, I have successfully managed the following: 1) Created a Lite Touch x86 PE Boot Image (using MDT 2010), imported into WDS, and PXE booted to this image, all fine. 2) Used MDT 2010 to get an unattended install of Win7 x86 onto a HP dc7700 SFF PC. I followed their guide to the letter (bar office 2007, since I hope to install this via GPO) and it worked brilliantly. It just prompted me for a logon credentials to attach to the Deployment Share, set a computer name, ask to join the domain, and choose an OU in AD with which to place the machine in. (I don't mind this at the moment, since I can fiddle with machines in Workgroups before adding to domains and applying largely XP based policies). It then went off, did its stuff, rebooted, logged in and finished the installation as local administrator. I have found a few minor issues so far (with no easy solutions). 1) It didn't install my modem driver, even though I provided MDT with the driver in its out of box drivers section. Do I need to tell the unattended.xml file to use this driver at a certain point, and how do I do this? This happened on more than one type of HP workstation. I am not sure whether it might have something to do with the driver being unsigned, as when I tried to install the driver using the wizard manually, when told to look in the driver folder, it couldn't find one. When forcing the issue, it was fine, but complained that the driver would probably not work (even though its the correct one off HP's website!!). Once installed by hand no issue, although I would like to automate this. I know with RIS and the sif you could turn off driver signing policy with the "ignore" property. Is there a way to do this in MDT 2010? 2) The one time I tried to join it to the domain (using settings in the unattended.xml file) it fell over (not sure why) at present. I think it may have had something to do with the auto-login as local admin to finish the installation, but I have yet to sort this out. 3) I did try capturing my machine image with the modem driver, by setting up a 'sysprep and capture' task sequence. This worked okay and successfully captured a wim image back to the deployment share as I wanted. However, when trying to use the new image (with driver) it installed okay, but the driver wasn't installed, and it wasn't doing a complete unattended install. When I tried to create a new unattend.xml with the captured image and new task sequence it fell over and complained. I even tried to copy a blank CLG file from the Win7 DVD but this didn't work either. :confused: I do not think that this is the correct way to do things in Win7 and the OS should be hardware independant, meaning that one image fits all (with the correct drivers of course). Going back to my original post about how to get the modem driver to install using the IT Idiots method, albeit tweaked to allow my modem driver would really be helpful. 4) Activation and Licensing - this has given me a headache all afternoon. We are a SA school, and from the licensing website, have been provided with a KMS key, and two MAK keys for Windows 7. I understand the process of how MS would like KMS to work, and that we need at least 25 activations of Win7 before they work properly (not a problem, we have 700 machines). We have even used a MAK key by hand to activate Win7 x86, which worked okay. I have entered one of the MAK keys into the Unattend.xml config, for both Oobe and specialize sections, but have yet to try a redeploy using this, as we got kicked out by the caretakers this afternoon, and it was snowing so had to make a quick dash home, all safe now though! Anyone else in a similiar situation to me? Cheers for any help Thanks, _techie_

Prevent access to the context menu's on the taskbar Prevent changes to Start Menu and Taskbar settings both in: User configuration Administrative Templates Start Menu and Taskbar HTH

Hi, Returning to this thread a few days on, and we have been monitoring it closely with vmware client. It appears that the disk usage is not very high, but being sustained over a period of about 20 minutes or so. During this time, the esx grants more memory to our debian/moodle box, the CPU usage drops to 'almost' nothing, and the network activitiy drops to zero. I guess the lack of network connection is why apache cannot deliver webpages out to workstations around school, but as to what is causing it, is a mystery at present. Any other ideas? as we switched off backups for except for saturday only, (in moodle), so it can't be that. Thanks,

Is it just me, or have the last couple of versions of browser plugins just not deployed properly... I obtained the MSI's through the licensing/distribution pages, which I would have thought would have been tested, but hey-ho I did Adobe Flash Player 10a before october half term, which deployed okay, files installed, but the .ocx file did not register correctly, so had to setup a startup script to use regsvr to register the ocx file. Now I have to get Shockwave 11.5 running. Again the MSI file installs fine without problem, but when I come to use the add in for IE7, it starts to install again, when you arrive on a website that needs shockwave. We have installation restrictions here to stop stuff being installed willy nilly, so Shockwave just falls over, and the add on is not installed correctly. The website then refueses to work, which needs shockwave. I thought this was supposed to work when I deployed it from GPO??? What's going on? If I run the website with administrative privilages, it works fine, but I have 700 workstations to do. To me this is just unnacceptable Adobe and means that deploying via GPO is just pointless. Might as well go back to standard installs, by hand... Starting to lose the plot with adobe... At the end of the day, is the software free or not? If it is, just provide it easily for network managers etc, or risk them being annoyed, rather than having to go through some pointless registration scheme to deploy your so-called 'free' software. Please discuss!

Thanks, It was set to run today (Tuesday), Thursday and Saturday at 2:0 From the logs on vmware client, it appears that this was running correctly on the Saturday, but not today?? It started today at 09:05am right at unit 1!!!! Is there a problem with cron wiping out our clock settings? Thanks,

Hi, We have been running Moodle successfully for the past couple of months with good usage from students and staff. We are running it on debian, with apache, php, and mysql, all on one box, which is virtualised on esxi 3.5. In the past week, we have noticed that the server which Moodle sits on, is occasionally using very high disk usage, which slows moodle down, so that it cannot even deliver requests for web pages. The CPU, memory, and network usage also drop down to a minimum, rather than the normal use levels. Does anyone know what might cause this problem. My colleague believes it might be something to do with a cron.php script running, or some sort of backup running in the background? Any help would be appreciated, as we are scratching our heads on this one. I don't think it is any form of DoS attack, as the network usage is basically nothing. HELP! Thanks, techie

Here's our setup if its any help server 1 two drives - C: and D: C: contains windows dir etc for server install D: contains work for students/staff (250GB) Create directory in root of D: called 'students' set share name to be students, with permissions to 'everyone' and security to Admins/Domain Admins only. You can then access students 09 from any workstation across the network, with Administrative privileges. Within students, setup year of entry folder (e.g. September 2009 students Y7) in 09 Within 09, setup each users home directory to match their username. E.g. Paul Jones in Y7 would be 09JonesP, with a matching directory name within 09. Set share name of 09JonesP to be 09JonesP$. This makes it a hidden share, which is a good idea, with lots of students, as when using UNC paths, it will list only the visible shares \\server1\. There are utilities out there that will do this in bulk from a CSV file. HTH

If you don't mind shelling out a bit, and limiting it to a few machines, reading text from a website, scanner, PDF or word document is very easy with the product we use: ClaroRead. I think it even comes as an MSI, so deployment is easy, should you wish to shell out on it. HTH Mark

GRRRRRR!!!!! Why o Why o Why Adobe??? All I want is an installer for the Adobe trial...why do I have to use some Akamai Download manager? Just give me the damn file!! It keeps pausing, after trying to calculate the file download time... Is there a way around this? Cheers all.

Yes, but I would really like to not be involved in the process, regarding batch resizing of images using Irfanview... The member of staff has quite basic ability, which is why they came to see me to start with. Interesting point about databases, but I would rather try and keep it simple as possible. It is not student photo's either, just some pictures of food, which need to go onto labels. It is for the Food/HE Dept. Thanks, I will keep looking as well as taking onboard your suggestions.

Hi, Special request came in today from a member of support staff: They would like to print a selection of photo's onto address labels. However, they used Word, and they had to resize all the images to fit the address label size. Is there anyway that a group of pictures (possibly using something else) could be automatically resized to fit a set of labels, without having to resize all the pictures manually to fit? Your advice and opinions please! Thanks, _techie_

Thanks for everyone's help. After a bit of fiddling and a decent nights sleep, I used the Word Columns feature, (as advised) which worked very well. Using 3 columns gave good space, and a decent number of pictures, but I managed to reduce the size of the photo's slightly, and put four columns in on one piece of paper Teacher who asked for it is very happy now, so I told him to thank the nice people on edugeek... Thanks all! _techie_

Where do you enter in the record start and record end, when using Word Columns? I found that tables were a bit funny as well! Thanks,

Thanks guys, I now have normal photos! Is there anyway I can have a row of 3 different students with names, within a table, and repeat the tables row? Like below Photo :: Photo :: Photo Student1 :: Student2 :: Student3 Repeat Down? Thanks. I noticed some other field names such as 'grouping' and record sum etc within word 2003. Can I utilise these somehow? Thanks,

Sorry, I must be being thick here, as I can't see where you do this? When I click to add the photo field from Basic details in the left hand pane, there doesn't seem to be anyway to set the size?

Hi, In SIMS.Net, We have setup a user defined group, but would like to create a photo list of the selected pupils from the list. I did try doing this via reports, but the photo's came out all different sizes... Is there anyway to sort out the photo sizes? Thanks,

Fixed it, it was to do with names, matching usernames in AD. Sorted it, but thanks for your help!

Yes the next line refers the pupil OU, but all their accounts are working, its just these couple of admin users that won't work! I can even log on to a curriciulum domain with the non-working moodle user, and can do all the normal stuff, that any user does. I even created a new user, and move it to the non-working OU, so I presume that their is something wrong with the non-moodle working account.

This is it!

http://www.chase.worcs.sch.uk/imgs/moodleldap.jpg

Tried, this, and no joy. Even added the user to all the normal security groups, as a working staff member. I even tried logging onto the domain, in case it was looking for some sort of timestamp on the user account, to be updated, but no joy...:confused: Still trying stuff!