netadmin

We run Windows Server 2008 R2 domain controllers and Windows 7 Enterprise 64bit workstations, along with Deep Freeze (configured to reset on each restart). When each Windows 7 computer starts up, the first user to logon takes about 60-75 seconds to logon. However, the second user (any user from the domain, not just the first user) logs on in no more than 25 seconds. I setup group policy to 'verbose' and there is a slight extra delay for the first user in 'Please wait for the User Profile service' but most of the added time for the first user (at least 30 seconds) is at the final step, 'Preparing Your Desktop'. I have tried the group policy option to wait for network on startup, but that has not helped. Does anyone have any ideas on how to get the first user to logon faster, like the second user does? Thanks!

Thanks, that is exactly what I was needing.

I am trying to update our school website and have run into a bit of a challenge. We had a new website template designed by a graphics designer and they are insisting we use image buttons for the navigation menu so that everything matches their template. While that is fine for the static buttons, SMT is also wanting to have a dropdown menu appear below the image buttons when clicked (and they want this menu to be a table, with one column for the links and the other column a photo). The graphics designer does not do web coding, so I am having to figure this out. I've spent several hours this afternoon looking for scripts that can popup the menu/photo when an image button is clicked but have not found anything yet. Does anyone have any ideas or know of any scripts that can do this? SMT wants the site done by Monday so I'm a bit rushed trying to figure this out. Thanks for any help you can provide.

You will need a module from Cisco to insert into the SFP port on the Cisco switch. The LC-ST cable would then plug into the module in the SFP slot.

I'd recommend Office365/Live@EDU as well. This gets you nearly all the benefits of in-house exchange, but eliminates the hardware and licensing expenses, along with much of the maintenance. Microsoft also provides free support for Office365/Live@EDU customers as well. We migrated to Live@EDU about one year ago and have been very pleased so far. We had looked into both Google Apps and Live@EDU at the time, but our SMT found the Exchange interface through Live@EDU to be the easiest to use.

The open another mailbox option allows someone to access another mailbox they have been granted access to. An example would be if you have an IT department with multiple techs and each tech has their own mailbox, but you also have a departmental mailbox that each person needs to check. If you grant each tech access to the departmental mailbox, then they login to their personal mailbox and then open the department mailbox using the link you saw. I do not believe it is possible to change that mailbox permission through the Live@EDU GUI; it can only be done through PowerShell as far as I know. To connect to Powershell, use the following commands (enter your admin Live@EDU id and password when prompted): $LiveCred = Get-Credential $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection Import-PSSession $Session To add the open permission through PowerShell, use the following command (filling in the email addresses, of course). Run this additional times if you need multiple users to be able to connect. Add-MailboxPermission "EMAIL ADDRESS YOU ARE WANTING TO CONNECT TO" -User "EMAIL ADDRESS YOU ARE WANTING TO GIVE RIGHT TO" -AccessRights fullaccess Note that if you want to be able to send emails from the mailbox you are connecting to, you also need to run the following PowerShell command. If multiple users need send rights, just add additional email addresses at the end (using commas as separators) - do not run this command multiple times as otherwise it will replace the previous entries. Set-mailbox -identity "EMAIL ADDRESS YOU ARE WANTING TO CONNECT TO -GrantSendOnBehalfTo 'EMAIL ADDRESS YOU WANT TO GIVE SEND RIGHTS TO'

I imagine it will. We use Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 16 (Network) on Windows 7 without any issues (ours also runs from a Windows 2008 server). When you launch the client program on Windows 7, it says it is an unsupported operating system, but it runs fine.

Thanks Michael. Has anyone been able to solve the .local issue with Lion? I've found many solutions for the .local issue on Snow Leopard (and successfully tested one on an test machine), but Lion seems to be so new that there are few working solutions for .local presently.

We have just purchased a few iMacs running 10.7.1 Lion for our art program. I have tried joining the first computer to our Active Directory domain (it is a .local domain) both through the native OS X users application and through Centrify Express, but login time always seems to average between 3 and 6 minutes. Does anyone know of any tricks to getting Lion to login users to Active Directory in a halfway reasonable amount of time? Thanks for any tips.

I use Input Director and it seems to work well: Input Director - Software KVM to Control Multiple Computers

All of our campus printers are networked through a Windows Server 2008 R2 print server. Does anyone know if there is an application available that would allow students to email documents to the print server, and then for the print server to automatically print them to a specified printer? Thanks.

We have 1GB connectivity to the desktops from the switch (this test computer is currently connected to the same switch that the servers are). I am currently testing with a few test user accounts that have no files saved on the desktop, my documents, etc. Deep Freeze is installed and clears the local user profiles on each reboot. Something interesting I noticed: regardless of which user account I use, the first login after the computer has been restarted always has this 30-45 second delay. However, any logins after that by other user accounts have a minimal 5-10 second delay.

We are starting to roll out new desktops with Windows 7 Enterprise SP1. For the initial troubleshooting, I have turned the verbose logon option on. The problem we are having is that each time a user logs into a workstation for the first time, there is a 30-45 second delay at 'Preparing your Desktop.' (The rest of the logon process only takes about 10-15 seconds). We do have an image set as the user background, so the issue with the solid color background images causing a delay should not be the cause of this problem. Any ideas on how to possibly reduce this delay at 'Preparing your Desktop'? Thanks.

We will have a single SAN once the hardware arrives. We equipped the SAN with dual controllers which should improve reliability quite a bit as I believe each controller has separate firmware, etc (this second controller added about $3k to the SAN price). Ideally we would have gotten two SANs for redundancy, but SMT did not want to spend the extra funds for this.

We just bought two new servers and an iSCSI SAN to use for Hyper-V clustering and live migration. We debated about whether to get SAS or iSCSI, but ended up getting the iSCSI SAN because it provided more future expandability. We will be using Cluster Shared Volumes for the live migration/failover. A quick note: the built-in Windows Server backup and many server backup programs will not work with Cluster Shared Volumes. If you go this route, you might want to look into something like Microsoft DPM Server 2010, which does support CSVs.

For our Live@EDU system, I setup a simple SSO page on our IIS server (uses Basic Authentication presently). By doing this, I was able to configure the IIS authentication to automatically add the domain name so users only have to enter their username. It seems to work pretty well. If you want to try this, there should be a guide to getting SSO setup along with a sample ASP.net application on the eduadmin.live.com site.

I am trying to implement VLANs on our campus network and have a few questions. Our network currently consists of four wiring panels (each has a D-Link DGS-1224TP switch) which all connect back to a DGS-1224TP switch in the server room through the SFP fiber connections. The present DHCP server is a virtual Windows Server 2008 R2 standard instance running on Hyper-V. The present router is a Sonicwall NSA 240. I am wanting to create the following VLANs: #1 VLAN for wired desktops, printers, projectors (this VLAN would have access to the internet and all devices in that VLAN) #2 VLAN for VOIP phones (this VLAN would have access to the internet and all devices in that VLAN). These would be tagged to VLAN#2 based on the switch port. I am also planning on implementing a Ruckus wireless network across the campus soon. Once that is installed, I plan to have two SSIDs: #1 SSID for student/staff laptops (access to only the internet) #2 SSID for IT staff (access to all devices in VLAN #1 for wired desktops + access to all devices in IT staff wireless SSID + access to internet) On to my questions: 1. Can I configure the Windows Server 2008 R2 DHCP server to provide addresses to the two different VLANs, using different address ranges? My plan was to add one NIC to the DHCP server for each VLAN. Would that work? 2. When I implement the Ruckus system, will it be possible to have the IT staff SSID link to the VLAN #1 (wired desktops) and get the DHCP IP address from that VLAN, but have the student/staff SSID link to its own VLAN (this would be VLAN #3) and get its DHCP IP address from a third scope on the DHCP server? I appreciate any guidance and suggestions you may be able to provide on this.

I think Fog will prompt you to create a database the first time you login to the web console (rather than creating it during the install).

You might also look at Comodo Time Machine (Data Recovery with Comodo Time Machine | Comodo) or EAZFix (EAZ-FIX Professional). I've used EAZ Fix on several of our laptops for simple recovery. It's worked well so far. I'm not sure exactly how much of the image restore process can be automated on either EAZ Fix or Comodo Time Machine, but you might want to look at these if you have not already.

We currently have about 10 virtual servers that run on two physical servers; we are wanting to replace the servers and add a SAN for high availability of the virtual servers. Presently, all virtual servers are stored locally on SATA 3 drives and no SAN is installed. Right now, I'm looking at two Dell PowerEdge R510 servers and one Dell MD3200i SAN (the SAN would be directly connected to the R510 servers using 1Gb Ethernet). A few questions: 1. I am a bit concerned on if our disk access will be much slower using the SAN. Our current disk drive (SATA 3) shows an average speed of 76.2MB/s and top speed of 96.9MB/s per HD Tune. Any thoughts on if the iSCSI drive access would be fairly similar to our current speeds, faster, or slower? 2. Has anyone on here used a Dell MD3200i SAN for a high availability Hyper-V setup? Thanks!

Here, all staff and the older students (grades 7 and up) have a photo ID card that also works with our facility access control system. Staff are supposed to have their id 'visible' at all times while on property, but this is not really enforced much (although when everyone has their ID visible, it does look much more professional, in my opinion). The students with ID cards are just supposed to keep them with them. All of our exterior doors are locked at all times, so unless staff or students have their ID card, they can't get around the campus.

One of our teachers wants to use a video on the following website (Climate Change: Coral Reefs on the Edge || View Online from The Video Project) in an upcoming lesson. However, the video player only loads for admin users. If a teacher/student tries to load the webpage, it gives a Quicktime unknown format error. Our teachers/students have limited accounts. The workstations run Windows XP Professional with Internet Explorer 7. Windows Media Player, Quicktime, RealPlayer, VLC, and FLV Player are the multimedia players installed on our standard image. Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this issue without making everyone admins?

We use AutoDesk TrueView 2011 (Autodesk DWG TrueView (Includes DWG TrueConvert) - DWG Viewer and Converter) on our Windows XP machines. I do not give our users admin rights and no one has reported any problems using it yet. We do not use terminal services though.

We have used Deep Freeze for about five years now, and Symantec Endpoint Protection for about two. Deep Freeze has significantly reduced problems with our computers. For Symantec, we do not have it installed to a separate partition. Instead, we have a daily "maintenance period" scheduled during the night, when Deep Freeze automatically "thaws" all the computers and reboots. I have this maintenance period scheduled for about four hours, which is more than enough time for Symantec to push the updates to the clients, based on our settings in the Symantec console. I looked into the separate partition, but decided against it in case a bad virus definition file is sent out (like happened to McAfee earlier this year), as then if there are any problems with a definition file, cleaning up the problems is as simple as rebooting all the computers (by waiting until the definitions have been out for several hours before they are applied to the "thawed" state, then we know if there are any major issues). We don't use Oracle here, but it sounds like this might have to go to a separate partition.

Thank you very much Nick!