morganw

I managed to get an OxBox title to run from a server a couple of weeks ago without using their dodgy installers on the server. Do a server install on a workstation then move it to the server in a share. The config file in the root of the directory needs to be edited, do a find & replace to make sure the server path is set correctly - by default the share name the installer generates is half garbage anyway. This gets the resources to work. Then use a program like text crawler to do a similar find and replace on all files labeled .lessonplan. On mine there were about 1500 occurances spread through about 80 files. This gets the lesson plans to work correctly. Then I got a clean workstation and installed the client pointing at the share. I just copied the program folder from program files into a self extracting 7zip archive to silently deploy it. This is from memory, i've got notes though, i'll check again tomorrow. Their installer is a liability, I'll never run it on a production server.

I've just been looking at silent installs for quicktime, which seems to work with no problems, but doesn't register itself to actually open .mov files which was the entire point of installing it - it looks like nothing gets associated with quicktime at all. Are these file associations stored in the user profile or are they set for the computer? If I end up using mandatory profiles would I just set this in the profile or am I going to have to deploy with a transform, installer switch, or registry fragment? Also how do I stop quicktime from checking for updates and prompting people to upgrade. Any help appreciated.

FOG (www.fogproject.org) Been using that for about 18 months, very impressive and free. SpecOps Deploy 4 (www.specopssoft.com) Just purchased licenses for this to do OS deployment and application deployment. Very impressed with it and is based on Group Policy Objects so scales up nicely. The OS deploy part works as a wizard on top of WDS.

Currently looking at this... School Anywhere Moodle Personalised Learning Platform VLE for Schools - Moodle Hosting, Support and Training

We've had it for two years (hosted), not impressed with any of it. Not easy to use, slow, just logging in to the hosted system is too complicated for most people, password changes fail with generic unhelpful messages. Currently considering replacing with Citrix remote access to the actual SIMS client and Moodle add-ons for the parental gateway.

Yes, I would like to keep the home folders separate from the windows ones, I know when I tried the Apple AD plugin it just dumped the Apple home directory structure on top of the windows structure. So you ended up having a My Documents/Documents folder, and a My Documents/Desktop folder. Will be doing mostly video editing so it may require a separate storage server local to the Apple Mac room as well.

The best reason not to go over 25mb is that it's unlikely the majority of recipients will be able to accept more than 25mb. You'll make the situation more complicated if people start getting messages bounced back after a technically successful attach and send. It's also bad etiquette to send someone massive amounts of data that their email client will automatically download, especially now people are picking up email on their phones on slow links.

Thanks, i've managed to get it working but i'm unsure of my settings for the unix account mappings. At the moment i've got the provisioning agent to generate the account IDs based on the AD SID, and then also generate a new primary group for each user based on the AD SID. I've also set it to not truncate the usernames to 8 characters. My main worry is the primary group, all the management will be done through AD anyway but i'm worried about ramifications of generating so many of them. Are you using the provisioning agent or are you manually setting up the accounts?

I'm running the 30 day evaluation version on a Server 2008 R2 test system, I can only get the Centrify policies to import into the local group policy settings on the server, it won't let me import them into another other GPO. I'm also unsure of what I would do to redirect the home folders onto something (either OS X server or maybe SAMBA) and keep the home folder permissions correct. Also not sure how to structure the Centrify zone with AD. Basically I don't know what i'm doing. Can anyone help?

I've had similar package allocation problems before (i'm not going to be doing the SP3 upgrade though). Normally i'll end up rebooting the forest root server to 'unlock' the package control files (workstationname.ini) ,I've also done the the same thing in the past to fix changes to the start menu (program sets) not showing up. To be honest i'd restart all the servers and rebuild a few workstations from scratch, if it works then just rebuild them all to have peace of mind that everything has installed in the correct order.

If you've still got the drive that originally wrote the disk then try connecting that to give a better chance of the head aligning with the disk properly. Otherwise I would just try it in all the drives you can find (assuming this is a normal double density or high density disk). If it's something exotic like LS120 then you're going to struggle.

The ones I didn't reformat (1 x Windows XP, 3 x Windows 7) are fine. I seem unable to do anything useful after reformating though.

I've already got three of these, another twenty on the way. I've tried twice now to reinstall Windows XP (tried SP2 and SP3) with all of the drivers downloaded from the Dell website. The wireless drivers don't work at all and i'm getting blue screen crashes on SP2 after installing the audio drivers. Not too impressed with the 1520 so far.

I've had a look at a Solus3 guide, it looks like you can deploy the agent which then acts on it's own to install the infrastructure and sims components in the background. It doesn't appear to be very intelligent though, if someone is using the PC at the time it will reboot with no warning to complete the process. That's my understanding anyway. Hopefully the agent is lively enough so that it actually completes the installation before anyone tries to use the PC, it implements it's own load balancing with the SIMS server though so I feel there is potential for this to fail spectacularly. I still want to sit down and have another go at the batch file or an AutoIT installer but i'm really struggling for time at the moment. Something similar to this: http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/tutorials/winzip/winzip.htm

I thought this was for network profiles too, in testing mine didn't work either. Thanks for the info.

I shifted ours to a XenServer VM, it makes it really easy to recover from problems after fiddling with it or after running the latest update. Would probably make it easier to set up NIC bonding as you would set that up in the virtual machine environment not directly within the machine itself.

I moved servers when I was on version 0.25 I think, and also had the /images directory set up before hand as it was on a different set of drives. I had numerous issues after doing this (password mismatches, no .mntcheck files, TFTP errors when trying to update the boot menu). I wish I had documented everything that I had broken and then how it was fixed but it was over a year ago and I can't remember. You could try removing the FOG user from the OS and then rerunning the FOG installer to recreate it.

You can switch HAL after imaging, if it's working enough to replace the files. It's probably easier to go back to virtual box and rebuild from scratch with the correct HAL (enable or disable IO APIC) or use SysPrep or MySysPrep to change the HAL on the initial boot. This page tells you all you need to know about different HALs, and how to manually switch between them - Vernalex.com - Welcome

I had this same problem today, I was testing a workstation so I tried to upload a 25GB CC3 workstation (probably had hidden recovery partitions and such in there too). I left it resizing the image, when I came back I was getting FTP errors moving the temp image file. I deployed one of my normal fog images to it, then uploaded it back to the same image I was using before, no error. Were you trying to upload a standard-ish image without recovery/backup partitions?

Aren't the mount check files for NFS?

The one time I did have an FTP quirk I did manage to fix it by resetting all the passwords in configuration files, fog user, storage nodes, everywhere I could find a password. That was going wrong at the start of the image write though, not at the end.

Sounds like the fog user doesn't have permission to move the image file, for diagnostics you could just do a 777 on images and images/dev and see if that works.

I was looking at these as well... Thanks for the warning.

I think the most cost effective would be managed wireless, terminal servers, application like XenApp, cheap netbooks with long battery life. I'm trying to steer towards this at the moment after the VDI route was too costly, but we are only 1500 users. Problems would be: All you applications would have to be agreeable with virtualisation, you might have to lose some in the process. Expensive licensing on a per concurrent connection. Poor performance for heavy media work (depends on application). If the netbook screens are small it may hamper some applications / websites. Good things would be: Netbooks are easier to secure and store in a smaller space Long battery life so no recharges or spares needed. Central management which if you are understaffed would be a big deal. Remote access for everyone giving exactly the same applications / desktop through a web portal. Consistent environment both in and out of the building should aid the change for teaching staff. You can save on licensing and antivirus by using a Linux distribution like Thinstation to boot straight into the remote login, could probably go via VPN back into the school servers from home - No need to lock the machines down as everything goes over the network. Or just leave a web browser accessible on it to access a web portal.

Might be worth looking at SRWare Iron or SRWare Iron Portable rather than the Chrome install. SRWare Iron - The Browser of the Future