morganw

Remember that you cannot transparently proxy HTTPS without doing SSL interception with your own certificate. Everyone could get quite confused if "the internet" breaks everytime they try to login to a site.

"Documents and Settings" should be a junction so the path should be valid. How is this being run? Logon script? Startup script? No longer works is very different to no longer runs.

I've changed jobs since this, but try disabling Spanning Tree Protocol.

You could try repairing disk permissions. I'm not sure if you get the seperate boot partition if you install Lion as an upgrade, so if this isn't there just burn a DVD of the install media and boot that to run disk utility.

Are you running the installer directly from the MDT deployment share? I've found that a lot of installers acted strangely executing from here, probably because of lacking write permissions to this location. Try using a script or self extractor that will move the installer to the hard disk (e.g. %temp%) and then run it from there.

Or try forcing a reboot straight after the Sophos installer has finished. I recently did that in an MDT sequence and it seems to give up on trying to immediately update itself after a reboot, you would just have to make sure you aren't interupting anything else. I would recommend MDT as a way to enforce the order of the applications that you are installing or look at something like WPKG that you can run in the style of a service or execute directly as a script.

Any external USB DVD drive should do. You can probably get one for about £12. I did try the remote CD drive thing as well that lets you share the optical drive from another system, it did work but was pretty slow over wireless.

Yes. That is post imaging, right? I presume it doesn't say that beforehand?

This is for Windows 7 and MDT 2010, is a similar process for Windows XP though. Deploying Windows 7 - Part 1: Windows AIK 2.0 Enhancements

Some kind of timer, like this: XTimer - Timer and Stopwatch Utility with Source Code - CodeProject A lot of people seemed to find a use for it.

If this workstation is new it may default to using EFI boot and the Windows installation may partition the disk using GPT instead of MBR. That could cause problems, you can check in the disk management MMC snap-in in Windows. Also try booting FOG into debug mode and list the partition layout with fdisk -l. Run this before and after imaging to see if partition table stays consistent. If you are using GPT partitions then fdisk can't work. It is possible to install Windows 7 from the install media and not have the separate 100MB partition. This might be worth a go if you run out of other things to try.

Is the computer free from any hidden OEM restore partitions or similar?

General discussions about Thinstation - a Linux-based thin client ()

This will be down to profile management. Super mandatory or local profiles make this approach work well.

I had to use two different kernels to cover about 25 types of PC with FOG, with WDS there was one batch of particularly shoddy PCs that would crash in WinPE and when it doesn't work you don't have any options. WDS + MDT will do a lot of the hard work with Windows 7 Sysprep though, and also do dynamic driver injection. Someone recently posted some code on the FOG forum to do something similar with drivers but the Windows side will be more fiddly with FOG as you'll have to manage your own Sysprep process. I would read up on Windows 7 Sysprep and decide from there if you want to manage this yourself or get some tools to help you out.

Check out this thread on the FOG forum. I think as long as your first partition is the default size it should be handled automatically.

For flat imaging I think FOG has a lot to offer. To install from the original OS media, including updates, relevant drivers, and applications then I think WDS + MDT is the way to go.

It's been a while since I've looked at it, but I thought that if the OS type is set to Windows 7 then the 100MB partition is handled automatically and you can keep the image setting as resizable?

I think this is probably due to the LAN Manager authentication level which defaults to "Send NTLMv2 Response only" in Windows 7. Use the local group policy editor to change it to "Send LM & NTLM -- Use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated". Try changing the setting under Local Policies / Security Options / Network Security: LAN Manager.

I believe that settings will be merged between the different settings pages, although there must be some precedence if you set duplicate information. I would recommend going through this which describe how to do driver injection by make and model based on BIOS strings, then everything else becomes more straightforward.

FOG in particular doesn't play nicely with other software as the installer / updater assumes that it's the only thing on the server. . I would look at virtualisation or running in containers like OpenVZ or Linux vServer. Moodle requirements are generally dictated by concurrent users. I imagine Censornet may not perform well as a VM and you may have issues trying to virtualise it as it shipped as an appliance rather than a software package (been a while since I've looked at it though). For FOG have a virtual server for the web interface and TFTP and then deploy images from physical storage nodes, these can be any old PC or server and can be considered disposable. At least if you do virtualise or containerise something you've got the option to move to different hardware with a minimum of fuss if you do get performance issues.

Perhaps the home folders or some other resource is being indexed everytime someone logs in, hence the high load. What server OS is this and what protocol is used to connect to it?

Also, it might be worth checking out what happens if it builds into the same OU as an older computer that builds with no problems, to rule out any GPO stuff from interfering with the process.

If you are using a direct iSCSI connection to the server, you should be able to configure your backup drive to use a second cabled connection using one of the spare ports. So you would read one one cable and write on the other one.

So this iSCSI box provides storage for your fileserver as well as a backup for your fileserver? And the backup software is disk-to-disk? Surely it's using iSCSI that is the bottleneck here, it's not fast anyway but this will be reading files and writing the backups over the same network interface at the same time. iSCSI doesn't give you Direct Attached Storage it gives Network Attached Storage, are you sure it isn't using an external SAS connection to the fileserver? It would also be a really bad idea to be make your only backups back onto the same device or onto something in the same room. Is this your only backup system?