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Cheers Geoff, I will give a go right now.

Hi there, I have a bit of a problem with the Office Document Image Writer printer that gets installed with office. Is there an easy way to remove it across the domain? The scripts I've tried for removing regular printers have failed. I know I could re-deploy office again without the image writer selected, but that will really be a last option as I don't fancy creating the MST and having machine's take 30 mins to boot up while they re-do the install. Any ideas will be welcomed. cheers.

For us, as soon as they're out the door it's a case of "rd pupils98 /s /q"

You should block .vbs across the domain too though. We block *.bat, *.cmd, *.vbs and the allow 'pupil.bat' (or whatever) as a hash rule. A hash rule over-rules a path rule, also a 'more specific' path rule unrestricted over-rules a less specific path rule. I.e. if you block *.bat but allow pupil.bat then the pupil.bat should run as the rule is more specific. We've found that isn't too reliable in the past though. Allowing hash rules does seem to work for us every time.

What do you guys set as your DHCP gateway? Is the router's LAN the correct thing to do?

Before we installed our ISA2004 box, DHCP used to give out the IP address of the router as the Router option. Now that we've installed the ISA we've set the LAN ip address of that as the router/gateway. Is that how everyone else does it? Everything does seem to work under that setup, but if you do a "netdiag" from anywhere, you get the "[FATAL] NO GATEWAYS ARE REACHABLE" message. I guess that may not be a problem, but I'm just looking for some 'best practice' advice I guess. Thanks.

Everyone here is hollering for WSUS. It is great, but if he's only got one DC and is running SIMS then there is no way he should install it on that. I hate having two SQL items on the same machine, always has given me trouble in the past. If anyone else has installed WSUS (not SUS) and SIMS together on the same server I'd love to hear about it.

Cheers Geoff, I just wanted to confirm that PSShutdown does not have this problem. It works if no one is logged on too. Cheers for that.

Nice one Russ, Cheers. Server 2003 comes with SMTP, I believe, which means I could probably use that if I had any idea how to configure it. :-)

Cheers for the response AJ, I'm not sure what MOM does, but I'm sure that the technologies used by SBS to email are already in 2003 somewhere. Apart from Exchange and ISA2000, I don't think there are actually any new pieces of software in SBS, it just configures it all nice and easily for you.

I recently installed a trial of Small Business Server 2003. One thing I liked about it was that it emails you a daily and weekly summary of how the server is getting on (if any services are not running, how much space is being used up on each drive, etc.) and when certain events happen, like if the server reboots, etc. Is there a way to get regular Windows 2003 servers to do this? I know that SBS2003 comes with Exchange, but I didn't configure that, so I guess it used IIS and 'some other stuff'. Any idea how I can do this? Cheers.

One thing that gets on my nerves is not being able to right-click a DHCP lease and choose "Reserve". How difficult would that have been for them to add.

No, I don't think there is such a setting. Applying a logon script to a computer's classroom OU that connects a printer can be done though. Haven't had to leave my chair to set up printers for years now - Thank God.

You can do that in 2003. Not 2000

We had problems with this too. You have to disable offline files in the "computer" AND "user" areas of a group policy. That definitely works throughout the domain.

Do you apply a lot of seperate group policies to the users/machines - we found that this makes a difference..

Aah, I forgot about the whole RIPREP thing; I've never used it, but is it like this? You build up the machine how you want it, run RIPREP on the client and that copies the files to your server? How does that work with different hardware? I only use RIS to build the image from a slipstreamed OS CD. That way RIS 'installs' the OS as normal so it works on any hardware - therefore you only need one RIS build.

We still use ghost. I don't see how RIS can compete with Ghost. Can't you just deploy the OS using RIS and then you have to deploy the remaining software using AD and MSIs or setup.exes with answer files. That's ok for some software but the crappy stuff you have to install on curriculum domains can rarely be deployed easily. I'd love to know how you get around those programs. (P.S. in spite of my above post I AM a fan of RIS - we use it to build new servers and 'clean' XP machines - mostly for testing purposes)

Is it too late to add a poll? AMD all the way btw.

I was wondering what they were until you said. They just looked ilke 'blobs' to me.

Geoff and tarquel - How can you disable that with GPOs?

Don't mind them tarquel, they're just yanking your chain. Everyone knows that eval software is free forever.

Yes, I always use the ghost console with sysprep etc., works great. The one thing I haven't done is use the AI builder thing. Have you?

Ghost Corporate 8.0

Yep, Life goes on Nath. They didn't tell me afterwards though - it looks like it's all news to them. The part I quoted earlier was from a reply from them about where the files are kept. They don't seem to realise the a repair would wipe out everything. It is a good product though, and I can't imagine life without it tbh.