Jamo

Which switch are you using for your layer 3 routing? The VLANS will need to exist on this switch and need to be trunked down the switches to the end of the chain if there are access ports required on switch in any but VLAN1.

We were a little concerned that MS would be upping the price once schools are on board. This would be a dangerous position to be in as the buyout is totally unaffordable :/ What other options are available to schools so that we would be able to use the volume deployment tools in W7? It is so hard to find this info out!! We to be honest will probably go for the EES evenually but we would like to know the alternatives so that we can make an informed purchase.

Alternatively, depending on your package manager you could call a batch script which runs each of a set of installers silently?

You could just repackage using WinInstallLE or any packaging software. All it is doing is capturing the changes on the hard drive so it would work. Is there any reason for doing this? Seems like it would work against you in the long run as updating one peice of software would mean updating the entire package just for the one title.

I love these iPad in schools idea! I wish that we could see a documentary on their use in a couple of years!! Don't get me wrong a touch screen device (iPad or whatever) would be great fun for the students, not something that they would be using every day. But a device with no user replaceable parts? A device which can not be effectively centrally managed (that iPhone thing doesn't count!!)? A device which isn't capable of running flash, which almost all VLE's use and certainly isn't going to be dropped by the educational software manufacturers any time soon!? Who will pay when they break? The parents pay twice for the iPad? Or was is little Johnny's fault not Steve's so his parents should pay? If the parents cannot afford are these students left out? Then they have to use... books? Surely not! The personal devices idea in schools has already failed dismally with laptops, why on Earth are people still fighting for this! Its an administrative nightmare. Schools are educational environments not play grounds for new technical equipment. Phew. Saying that I did like the iPad when I used one. I am almost annoyed at myself lol

Good question! I am not 100% sure tbh, I got around the fact I have RIS and WDS on different servers by specifying a boot image in WDS which overrode the DHCP boot options. I now just enable and disable them on the two different servers and it works fine. I left the WDS ones as default which was the one I posted in the earlier post. Is the WDS server still able to respond to clients? If you go to AD users and computers and find the server there are some weird WDS / RIS options in the computer tab which have to be enabled for the server to be allowed to respond to PXE clients. Google Image Result for http://filedb.experts-exchange.com/incoming/2010/02_w07/232098/PXE-Response.png

Interesting, hmm lol does it get the IP address from DHCP then fail to actually find anything or does it hang on a screen? I have found that if it hangs on a screen then its because the DHCP options are set to the wrong .com file

Have you looked at GPP? It gives the options to remove all non local printer connections etc. Very powerful when combined with item level targetting.

That means that the 3Com PXE server is still controlling the PXE boot environment so a service or program is running on the server which is getting there before WDS.

Hmm thats odd. If you set a default boot image for WDS then it will automatically boot into the image and bypass the DHCP settings. That would tell you if its them at fault. What happens atm when you PXE boot?

Thats teh one it should be on boot\x86\pxeboot.com or something similar. Just below you can also set a default WIM for booting straight into (IE it won't prompt for which image you want to boot to it will just go straight in). The other DHCP options are available in the scope options of your DHCP server and are option 66 and 67. 66 is the PXE server IP and 67 is the default .com that gets loaded on startup.

Doh! Is WDS started? Have you checked the default image which is applied when WDS boots? You can force it to deploy a certain image file at boot time in the options, to get around the fact that we had PXE options defined in DHCP I set WDS to auto boot from my MDT WIM when it is active.

Just a note, you can only have one PXE environment on a subnet at a time in a useable form! If you want WDS to work disable the 3Com services and visa versa. It sounds like the 3Com services are just pipping WDS to getting the clients attention. We have an ancient version of Ghost which runs with RIS (WDS in legacy mode), just requires RIS setting up then using the Ghost boot wizard to add the network drivers to the options of boot discs. It also required those two DHCP options to specify the RIS image to use on startup (would have to look those up if it sounds about right lol)

Yeah as Jinnanonnixx says it gives you an access denied message because you are running it too far up the folder tree if you see what I mean. Basically you are adding yourself to the permissions on that folder as it runs, so you have to start from a folder which you ALREADY have full control over otherwise you will be epic denied.

Yeah iPhoto is also weird as it won't let you save the iMovie files to an NTFS partition you need to run it with ALT-click so you can select a non default location!!!!

One strange thing I have noticed is that if you redirect the users home directories to your Windows shares that if you havent already created the folders in My docs (Desktop, Libraries etc) then OSx doesn't give the user permission to read back the files in some of the dirs (namely the desktop folder). We get students able to save work and then not move / copy it at all! Very odd!

This is the point and print restrictions on 2008 I think you are referring to. Basically allows a client to trust the print server without authentication (which a non admin user cannot provide)

Should be all good Just make sure that permissions are only added and none are taken away! You should end up with the administrators group having full control but the owner shoudl remain as the current owner of the profile itself

Is the desktop folder a subfolder of the My Documents? In which case redirecting the desktop won't technically affect their data they will just have to browse further for it (possibly making the task of organisation a little more appealing )

You could also redirect their desktop using GPO to an empty folder which they dont have write permissions to?

As an administrator you will have permission to alter the security permissions on the folder. Running as a system account was meant as a workaround to the treesize program rather than for actually changing the permissions on the folders themselves.

Yes I think retrospectively it would have to be done by script as the permission inheritence would have been broken by default when the profiles are created. I would start by adding the GPO setting suggested by Badders and then try running the script on a subset of folders so you know it is working before trying it on the live system . Dont want users not being able to access there own files!!

You should have the administrators as a delegated permission on all user areas anyway, it is good practice for administration, then the users can be owners of their own files but you still have access to them regardless.

Hi all! We are currently planning the migration of the domain to a 2008R2 setup from the current 2003 servers. From what I have read this will involve installing R2 fresh on a server and introducing this into the domain (after first updating the schema using adprep?). After this transfer all the FSMO roles to the 2008R2 server and move DNS + DHCP etc to 2008 servers. We can then begin to decomission the 2003 servers so we are left with just 2008R2 eventually. We have exchange 2003 which from what I am reading is not compatible with 2008 at all, would it work if we left it on a 2003 member server? Would the exchange tasks etc still work in the same way in AD users and computers? We are currently planning a virtual copy of most of the domain services to run the upgrade in a sandbox first, so fingers crossed we will encounter most issues before we run it on a live environment! Any help will be much appriciated. James

I had a go a while back at weather widgets, found that flash items seem to work pretty well. Flash Weather Widgets - User Interface - Flash Components A lot of them are commercial on the web. but they do look good! Its always worth checking that they are able to get the weather data from a location close enough to you to make them worth getting, as there is nothing more frustrating that looking at the screen saying blazing sun shine and then out the window is driving rain!! I also found a lot of useful flash Clocks on the net too. Flash Clocks Website | Flash Clocks for Websites and Blogs It was the only reliable way of getting the date/time to appear, tbh though it looks great as well That picture code by @Caffery is brilliant, much easier to manage than loads of powerpoints.