Jamo

We have about 400gb for the staff area atm. The server is virtual so the drive has been expanded a few times with a few tb free space on the SAN. One thing to mention is that its not just buying the discs its the backup of the data as well which causes the price hike for central storage compared to their drives at home!

Do we not teach fractions because they are an integral part of maths? After all they are just a representation of a value, 4/5 or 4 fifths or 4 divided by 5, they are all representations of the same thing. But they are all integral to maths. When it comes to manipulating them it is vitally important when you are studying physics and maths.

Clonezilla - About Clonezilla is so much easier btw, you can create a recovery DVD which you can use on multiple stations etc. Alternatively why not set up a WDS or MDT server? Bit confused about why you cant ghost over a vlan because of spanning tree? PXE boot to a remote vlan won't work without IP helpers, if you have symantec ghost just pxe boot to your domain and use the menu to chose the local hard drive or USB to take the image from?

When you say the staff laptops run on the guest lan do you mean they connect to the guest wireless? The certificates can be installed just by clicking on them but it needs to be valid for the client you are validating in the case of smart card or cert. Would be interesting to see a vanilla Windows client with standard settings on the guest and test the different sites. One way around a forced proxy issue is to use a proxy.pac autoconfig file in the guest lan and force them to use a LA upstream proxy if one is available then open the standard 80, 443 DNS and Proxy ports on the wireless firewall

It depends on what type of authentication you are using. Im guessing its going to be either 'PEAP-MSCHAP' or 'Smart Card or Certificate'. The first one of these you can log on using your username and password normally as a domain user, but the second would require you dealing out a trusted certificate to your iPad which I don't think would be an easy task! Much easier would be to create a test WPA SSID on your wireless APs If it works on your PCs there is no reason (in theory) why it shouldn't work with an iPad. I have used a combination of transparent proxies and firewall exception rules (so that port 80 is automatically proxied whereas 443 is just sent out as normal) Another way you can test is try to run Windows update on a normal PC (logged onto the Guest Wireless, making sure that it is accessing the external w update service not an internal WSUS) if it doesn't work (complaining of an unknown error(!?)) then you have a problem with HTTPS traffic being intercepted by a non compatible proxy and that is the part to look at. If Windows update works all ok and you can visit HTTPS sites using a standard Windows PC then it is back to the start and you can ignore my lengthy post

Are there odd security permissions on the OU itself?

Im guessing you are installing the drivers as applications upon reboot? Are the realtek HD drivers not part of W7 now anyway? James

Hi all! Anyone had any luck with stopping students from adding printers to stations.... They already cant through the normal add printer wizard. BUT some of them have found a way using the My Pictures section and clicking the photo printing wizard. This allows them to open the add printer wizard and to browse the directory for printers Is there a GPO i am missing to stop this? James

Yeah https and all Check your firewall settings and allow 443 traffic through, try connecting your iPad to the standard wireless rather than the guest and see if it works

By default squid cant proxy https requests (well it can but the HTTPS sites will deny access due to a man in the middle attack!!) You need to open the 443 ports on the firewall (usually guest networks have a firewall defined in the settings) and allow that traffic to flow through as it normally would to the upstream proxies (which are usually more able to handle the https traffic). I recently had this on a Smoothwall Express box bridging a LAN and our network, without allowing 443 directly through the firewall and into the upstream proxy all HTTPs sites just said that they didn't exist!

Are you running the iPads through a Guest wireless, a firewall or a transparent proxy?

Try to remove the XPS printer and have only the default installed. FMS is pretty rubbish with printers, I remember not too long ago that it wouldn't even start if a printer wasn't installed!

In MDT you can edit the unattend.xml file in the task sequence properties, just use the last tab and edit in there. To be honest the licence key is selected when you create the task sequence in the first place, have you tried recreating it?

Ah.... Looks like there is no auto refresh right click refresh and they appear! Many thanks for the help as always!!

Its weird there isn't an option to cancel the task sequence on the collection (just thought of that as i was walking to lunch!! The advertisment node shows the adverts but doesn't give a cancel option I can view the errors and warnings though but thats about it!! This program is soweird!

This may seem like a completely stupid question.... But how do you cancel an advertisment to a collection on SCCM when it is a Task Sequence???!?!?!?! It gives me no option to cancel which seems nuts. Now the job is advertised but will fail as it is configured wrongly! SURELY a cancel task button is in order here?!

This task has been forced on us by a rather nasty OSx schema update which was performed in 2005.... To cut a long story short we have a 2003 network which we were planning on performing the standard in place upgrade to 2008R2 with ADPrep etc and everything was going to go fantastically smoothly ADPrep fails to run due to some lovely named schema objects, unfortunately renaming these works to a point where ADPrep works, but unfortunately the changes then fail to replicate from the Schema master to any other server :s. Luckily this was all carried out in the sandbox environment so we still have a working network. The issue now comes with the best course of action. We are mulling over the idea of a complete rebuild of the network which is an enourmous task and only seems to get bigger when you sit down and plan the actions required to ensure a smooth transition. Has anyone here done this and got any advice or words of caution on how to proceed??? Currently our plan of action is to plan, then plan some more and build the network in a sandbox and migrate the databases for the softwares over during the closedown period. What tools are useful for this scenario? Has anyone had any luck with failed ADPrep issues? ADSIEdit shows the conflicting entries but it is a complete hack to get them to rename, ie you have to use an LDIF tool to tell the schema an update is in progress so it will allow you to edit the entries in ADSIEdit!!!?!?! Hope someone can help! James

Can you use wildcards? Ie * after the address? If not check when you have loaded the fronter page on your station and view the code, you should be able to see that in fronter the pages will be loaded from different addresses ie. x.fronter.com which may cause issues with your whitelisting

Turn cached mode off, and see if its the outlook profile data stored in the local profile?

I was going to suggest the Arduino stuff, it is rather good. Can pretty much make anything, they do an ethernet module I believe, coupled with homeplugs you could network to your hearts content

You could just turn a wireless router on with no cables connected and no password. It would broadcast the SSID and webpage. I can guarantee that as soon as someone realises that it is unsecured they will change the password though!!!

Any particular reason they needed testing? They are usually pretty failproof...

You have to hold ctrl while opening Excel and it will open in a new window. V V V V useful for screen spanning

I can't believe people are still sticking with XP. It wasn't even designed when dual cores in standard PC's were even slightly common. The whole software stack is completely geared against the multithreading that is available in the current OSs. x64 XP is a completely bad idea, MS have almost completely dropped support for it. Having to use XP at work feels totally backwards after all the GUI and usability advances in the later OSes. If you want a real boost in real term performance on modern PCs I would recommend an SSD for sheer boot up and also game loading time performance they cannot be beaten.

Btw I have enabled sharing between all my home W7 boxes and havent had to edit the registry once