morganw

Yes, this is the only Microsoft supported method.

Could you give more details on what you are actually changing permissions on? It would be great to have a 10 second logon time!

The only supported method is to export the default profile from a Windows 7 install, the only supported way to modify this profile is using the sysprep process. I just exported the default profile, then loaded the hive into regedit to modify the keys I needed to set, then unloaded it. Windows 7 is buggy with mandatory profile, you'll encounter bizarrely long logon times if you are using folder redirection and group policy preferences. Caching the profile should speed things up but you then loose some of the benefit of using the mandatory profile and it doesn't improve the lack of management options. You can export a normal users profile using something like 'Windows Enabler' or 'Hack UI' to ungrey the copy button but the resultant profile will have incorrect AppData references in it. Depending on what software you are using this may be acceptable to you or you may be able to fix these issues by deleting or correcting the keys.

I've seen numerous examples of chewing gum disabling USB ports.

The imaging is done with Partimage and that handles the MBR record seperately. You might be able to find more help if you searched online for Windows 7 and Partimage.

Do you mean the original is bigger?

Are you trying smaller to bigger or bigger to smaller?

A lot of people find that Windows 7 imaging only worked when the OS type was set to Vista. You can install Windows 7 to single partition by from it's own install but the sequence is a little convoluted. I have done it in the past though. You may want to upgrade to the latest version of FOG as I think that this removes the need for FOGPrep and may solve the problem. If you just want to clone devices you could use partimage more directly with something like PING.

I don't think there is a native Keynote viewer on Windows but you can use iWork.com to share and display the content on a Windows PC. You could also export Powerpoint files from Keynote but I think they will be flattened and rasterised so you wouldn't be able to edit them afterwards without remaking the slides.

Just to check, is the server OS the same version as the client OS? I believe that the server can only mirror updates based on it's own OS version.

I've installed it from scratch on two macs now, one brand new and one that's a year old. To me it seems to get to the logon screen faster but is still doing a lot in the background (hard disk is very busy compared to 10.6). If you have it set to auto-logon then I can see how it would bottleneck.

Just another thought: as a test you could try with Windows Vista or 7 as I don't think they had the same timing issue.

I just used Group Policy Preferences instead although you'll end up adding OUs and GPOs all over the place to acomodate people with fussy requirements for which printers they want. I'm pretty sure that the printer problem was never fixed, I don't think the service has been updated for ages as it still has issues with Windows 7 as well. I've not heard of anyone recompiling the service even though the source is all there. I've just switched to using this Logon script.

It's been a been a while but I seem to remember that the timing issue caused errors when setting the default printer because the printers were added slowly and so it was trying to set the default before it was actually there. My FOG stuff is all shutdown now as I've temporarily switched to MDT2010, but I think that error was when the the printer name didn't match anything in the driver definition file. Are you trying to setup a printer that prints directly to the IP address of the physical printer or have you shared a printer on a server?

The BIOS route is pretty neat if you can bring up a password protected boot menu but most motherboards won't do this, depends if you want to network boot a lot of stuff in a hurry. I'm using MDT2010 and if you don't put a password in bootstrap file it prompts for it. Depending on your DHCP setup you might find it easier to make an alternate DHCP group that does PXE booting and add/delete MAC addresses as you need to.

I always found that the FOG printer system on XP had some timing based issues. SourceForge.net: FOG - A Free Cloning Solution: Topic: Printer service causes logon error If you consistently don't get it though I would think it's probably down to some Group Policy settings that may be restricting the addition of new printers.

If the files are already gone from the folder, perhaps by using the powershell example for FORFILES, you could use: RD C:\Folder ...which would only delete it if it is empty.

Do mentions generate email notifications? If so @pat might be disappointed when he gets here.

Not exactly what you want but this does files based on their age: FORFILES /P "C:\Folder" /S /D -1 /C "cmd /c del @path" /D -1 is files that are over one day old edit: obviously this shouldn't be mention but I can't figure out how to turn it off, [at]path" is what it should say.

I've also has this happen when .NET Framework 4 was already installed, sometimes it would work properly but most of the time it wouldn't. I guess you could install it as a snap-in afterwards but it takes about 15 minutes to install. The latest version of FOG should open your sysprep.inf file from the init system and rewrite the hostname. You can then use sysprep to join the domain and the host rename and domain join functions of the FOG service should be redundant.

On one occation I had 250GB of data generated in one day from editing video, over half of this was just one student pressing all of the wrong export options in iMovie. It's a real hassle to back this stuff up.

Have you got your proxy details in the fog settings? The front page tries to connect to the internet to display the latest version number and estimated users.

I would recommend using backuppc to take backups using rsync at the end of every day. I guess it would depend on how much data is generated per day though.

That what I used for XP but I don't think there is a need for it with Windows 7 as the pnp process is now recursive in it's search for anything new that you've added into the image (as long as it's in the right place).

I think you can just copy all drivers into the driver store on the master image and they should get installed during deployment. If you need more flexibility then MDT2010 is the easiest way although I believe that FOG is getting functionality to modify sysprep.inf and unattend.xml files during the deployment process - initially just for modifying the hostname but it should be possible to adapt this to also change driver install paths on the fly.