morganw

Try putting one on a UPS and see if it holds the settings.

Have you got some kind of service level agreement with them? There are a lot of services that can be broken and you can soldier on but if your DNS isn't reliable then your network won't be either.

Our primary DNS and DHCP are on the same server and updates between the two are just a few seconds apart, if it takes a day to update DNS records then something is wrong with your configuration or something is interfering with it. The only problems I've had were when clients actually tried to update DNS themselves and the reverse lookups got messed up as they were already set via DHCP (normal Windows workstations won't do this but things like Apple's AD directory services plug-in will). Are your DNS and DHCP systems all windows based and integrated with AD? (and are these under your control?)

When you say dynamic DNS do you mean each client is responsible for it's own DNS updates, or is the DHCP server updating DNS when addresses are leased? You could try DHCP reservations rather than static IP addresses and then connect the printers to the servers with a standard TCP/IP port, then just leave everything else on DHCP with no reservations.

Use Group Policy Preferences to sculpt the existing start menu on computer startup, you can use checks to looks for each individual .exe of each program and also automatically remove the shortcuts if the program has been uninstalled. It adds about 20 seconds to computer startup but there is no redirection or user based login scripting so an actual login is really fast. Depending on how you deploy your software you can just call gpupdate to update the start menu while users are logged in and the they can use it without a reboot.

I've got two drivers that won't install from a sysprep image (IBM power managment and one type of audio chipset), both also require the installation of a service which doesn't get handled properly by the sysprep process. An easy way is to get a 7zip archive of the driver and create a self extracting installer that will run in a temp directory by using 7zip SFX Maker, then upload this as a snap-in. If you want a reboot to be incorporated then you could prefix the snap-in name with a "z" so that is last alphabetically (and so installs last) and then tick the box to request a reboot.

The installer isn't designed to run on a production system, it's designed to be run on a previously unconfigured server. It's also possible to have problems running the installer behind a proxy, I think I had to manually install the tftp server package as well as ensuring my proxy was set in apt.conf.

I was looking at Puppet for client configuration and software deployment but it isn't really click and go, it would take a few days to set everything up and I think Munki looks a bit more straightforward to use as it's OS X specific - hadn't heard of it before but looks quite nifty.

Deploy Studio is the best option and can also deploy the Windows portion of a boot camp environment as part of the workflow. Unfortunately on a Mac there is no way remotely trigger the imaging process, you have to actually stand there with your finger on the N key to get it to attempt to NetBoot. Also there is no way to pull software to install after imaging although you can incorporate pkg based installers into a Deploy Studio workflow which you can either make yourself or sometimes get from a products install media. So basically you make some big fat images with the bulk of your stuff in, customise slightly if required with the more optional bits like pkg based installs and scripts (e.g. to bind to directory servers), and then net boot everything to set it up. Your main problems will actually come after this stage, How do I run the apple software updates? The system won't automatically install them so you either have to login to each machine manually and run them or remotely call an installation command when you know the systems are not in use but will be on. Some updates are things like firmware upgrades and laptops will needs to be running on the mains for the process to properly complete. How do I run non-apple software updates? You can use things like Apple Remote Desktop to send out replacement .app containers and run pkg installs but again, the machines have to be on without anyone using them, you have to do it all live rather than assign software and let the workstation pick it up. It might even be easier to do a complete netboot reinstall if you have the time and just makes changes to your original images.

Are you able to migrate the guests between physical hosts? I upgraded to XenServer 5.6FP1 a couple of weeks ago and guests will crash after migration.

I had this exact situation and switched to using AFP shares on a Mac Pro a few weeks ago as the situation got so bad. If you search online for issues there are tens of different things you can try adjusting. A few of the top of my head: Tweak TCP/IP stack settings to modify delayed_ack value from 3 to 0 or 1 (this stops delayed transmission of packets to piggyback data and use less packets, try 0 for wireless clients and 1 for wired) Tweak TCP/IP stack settings to modify newreno value from 0 to 1 (this turns on a enhanced algorithm which came make a difference of some wireless networks) Check reverse DNS (this was definitely causing us some problems but I only sorted this after the switch to AFP, the Apple AD and Centrify Direct Control will, by default, send dynamic DNS updates which were clashing with the updates provided by the DHCP server). Make sure everything is set to use NTP so kerberos tickets will remain consistently valid. Disable spotlight indexing (home folders will get indexed as you log in which can cause performance issues). Disable Bonjour advertisements (On 10.6 don't disable Bonjour as it also now handles the unicast DNS as well, just stop advertisements) I think it's likely that if reverse DNS isn't perfect then the system will fallback to using mDNS lookups through Bonjour and this will introduce the delay although I've yet to re-test. My situation sounds identical to yours though, no apparently bottlenecks or problems with any of computers, but Apple systems were slow in accessing it (and unstable because of it). Interesting Apple are using their own SMB client in 10.7 instead of SAMBA components so this may rectify any issues or potentially make it all worse. I'm currently trying to get Kerberos working with Netatalk so we can store the shares on Linux on actual server hardware and have something that can actually scale, still playing with it at the moment though but the speed is good.

...and changing the drives is a good way to make it quieter, I'm using 3 WD Caviar Green drives in mine and it's quieter than just using the one hard drive that is supplied with it.

Thanks Michael. Are you still doing the .net framework scripts as well?

I would have thought that Xibo or Concerto would be the best way to do it? I wouldn't have thought a USB stick is a good way to organise the content though, and couldn't someone steal it if it's plugged in at the location? I was looking at Concerto as the viewer is web based so you could use a PXE boot on a low power PC, or a local linux install to autostart a web browser whereas with Xibo you need a PC Windows install to run the viewer. Maybe a TV with a web browser would have the necessary support for the viewer to run as well.

We moved from RM tutor to LanSchool, I considered it to have the best interface of everything that I looked at and the best deployment / automated setup features. Put each room on it's own 'channel', 'channel' 0 views all other channels and it's all configured with group policy. I believe they also added audio chat and a few other features in the newer releases that you may be missing if your support has expired. To be honest though after the problems we had with RM Tutor I would have been happy with anything else that actually worked.

Show them some screenshots of Microsoft Bob and see if they want that instead of Windows 7. Is this for a secondary school? I don't think older kids would like the fisher price approach.

Thanks, I did actually get this working a couple of weeks ago with the help from our local sims support. I was missing the exception for the SQL browser executable as I couldn't find it anywhere. Thanks for the confirmation that this is the problem though.

I would have thought that looking at custom/enhanced templates/blocks for Moodle would be a wiser move than bolting on extra systems any-time a feature isn't immediately available. I don't think you'll be doing the 'student experience' any favours by spreading an interface over two or three different products. If you get a decent frontpage and easy to understand structure people should appreciate it a lot more than a pretend desk and a tamagotchi.

Sorry I mis-read it a bit and thought it was the drive controller not showing up, i've never seen a drive even require drivers, I think it's more likely to be something left over from building the image in a virtual machine. You might have to remove any drive controllers from device manager before running sysprep, easiest way to check this though would be to try making a sysprep image on a physical PC. Older ACPI uniprocessor ones seem to put you in a better position (supports HAL switching to ACPI mutliprocessor and they normally don't normally require additional drivers for network cards or drive controllers).

You could try boot a Linux live cd and installing it, it would replace the MBR with an alternate boot loader so if that installs and boots then you know it's something malicious that was in your MBR. If you cannot install it then that would suggest something more serious, i.e. somehow it's got into BIOS but I wouldn't have thought that is likely, particularly if you can re-flash it with no problems.

Thinking about it further I don't think the you actually need the driver in the mass storage section unless your deployed images fails to boot, if you get past that stage it would install along with any other pnp drivers during the mini-setup. You'll have to setup sysprep to install all required drivers from within the image, I normally put them in C:\sysprep\drivers so they get deleted at the end of the deployment and then use the sysprep driver scanner from here before running sysprep.

There aren't any mass storage device drivers in there, it looks like mouse and keyboard drivers. It's been a while since I set up mine but I think I manually entered what I needed, I think I just added entries for various Intel ICH controllers on the end of what it generated from -bmsd. -bmsd should create a lot of entries (five or six hundred lines), then if you want to add your own you can just add them at the end like this: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2681&CC_0106=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaAHCI.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27C1&CC_0106=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaAHCI.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27C5&CC_0106=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaAHCI.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2821&CC_0106=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaAHCI.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2829&CC_0106=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaAHCI.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2922&CC_0106=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaAHCI.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2929&CC_0106=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaAHCI.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_3A02&CC_0106=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaAHCI.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_3A22&CC_0106=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaAHCI.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_3B29&CC_0106=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaAHCI.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_3B2F&CC_0106=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaAHCI.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_3B22&CC_0106=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaAHCI.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2682&CC_0104=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaStor.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27C3&CC_0104=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaStor.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27C6&CC_0104=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaStor.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2822&CC_0104=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaStor.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_282A&CC_0104=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\iaStor.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2820=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\ich8ide.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2825=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\ich8ide.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2828=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\ich8ide.inf PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2850=%systemdrive%\SysPrep\Drivers\MSD\Intel\ich8ide.inf

I've used the kickstart script to restore a site when moving to a new server, but I think it's designed to be used on a server that has the requisite components (i.e. LAMP) but no Joomla install. If you delete everything from the remote host then the restore process will recreate the filestructure and also set up the database.

I wouldn't have thought so, it won't run the same software used at school and a lot of education websites need flash so I can't see it would be useful there. I can't see how it's better than a laptop for writing things up or creating resources, due to the lack of physical keyboard. In fact the only thing would be useful is if you use it to access your MIS either through the browser or through a custom app - you could do this with any other kind of remote access system. I've also tried using a normal Windows XP desktop on one using a Citrix Connector to our XenApp server. It was bordering on unusable, the touch screen suddenly wasn't accurate enough because of the resolution needed to do anything. I was really disappointed with it as we were considering it for mobile registration.

It shows the filename when it downloads it, so the default one is just called bzImage. It might be worth you getting some kernels that have KS in the filename, these are 'kitchen sink' kernels that are built to contain pretty much everything going. You could either rename bzImage to something else and then rename a KS kernel to bzImage, or set the host at the kernel level. If you do the latter you'll see the filename displayed as the kernel is downloaded (when the dots are running across the screen).