Sam_Brown

If you're having people log in from off site then you'll need to update the A Record for the address they use to access it with the new IP address given by the new connection. We have portal.****.com which points to whatever external IP address the TSs are accepting traffic from. If your external IP has changed you'll need to point the address to the new IP address.

Good news is it isn't mandatory until July some time so shouldn't affect any tests anytime soon.

MRBS is really useful. We use IMAP authentication in order let staff log on. If you want some help PM me.

Do you have it set up so it will update even when the students launch it when an update is pending?

The only notification we get is from the exams officer. The same exams officier who kindly let us know three minutes after they had started an exam that they needed it upgrading despite us asking them well in advance for details of when the next exams were so we could make sure things were upto date To be fair, when it's up and running it's fine. I don't think we've had any issues with it once it's been updated. It's just the process of updating it that's so damn frustrating. Specifically the annoying issue of it trying to auto upgrade whenever a student trys to use it and it likes to get itself into a loop normally meaning student has to log out and back in otherwise it keeps on popping up every 30 seconds. We did have more issues than normal this time though. Firstly the server wouldn't upgrade properly which we were told to get round by deleting contact.ccf on the server and allowing it to recreate itself. We also had to totally uninstall it and reinstall on all the workstations it as it wouldn't update properly even with full permissions. I've made the decission to only run it on the thin clients now to stop the hassle of having to upgrade entire rooms by hand. It's a lot more manageable upgrading on 10 servers as opposed to 150 workstations and laptops.

Used it a few times. Only issue I had was it would only work with file paths under 250ish characters which was a bit of an pain due to some deep folder sturctures we had.

Cool. Hearing lot of good things about MDT. Looking for some decent guides or video tutorials if anone knows any!

Know any decent guides or video tutorials at all?

Hi guys, WHERE WE ARE... All computers are Windows XP. We have WDS set up on Server 208 R2 server. We currently do a normal PXE boot which then downloads the only boot image and runs a client unattend file to put in all the details such as authentication \ partition \ language settings. The only thing we then do is select the image and then it downloads. Computer restarts and it runs through the normal first time boot from a sysprepped machine. Everything is automated apart from asking for a computer name and administrator password. WHERE I WANT TO BE Similar to how it is at the moment however we want to move entering in computer name and the OU from after the image has been installed to doing it before the image has been installed. Guess what we want is to run it at the end of the day, enter the computer name and OU we want it to go into and then leave it installing the image overnight so we can return and everything has been done. Appreciate we can kinda do this with server properties on the WDS server under the ADDS menu but if we want to install 30 computers all in different rooms or they will be going into different OU's then it's not really going to work... Any ideas? Maybe a custom Windows PE image or some scriptng required? A script that will edit the Sysprep.inf that's run at the beginning and overwrites the one in the image when it's restarted? I don't know.

Finishing off a full virus \ spyware scan. Clean so far. Once that's run it's course I'll change out the NIC and see if it happens again. Will keep you guys upto date.

Only happens sporadically and only started yesterday. Yesterday the network was going incredibly slow. Some investigation showed packets being dropped, not being able to ping the gateway and just general connectivity problems all round. We narrowed it down to one port causing the issue and when we traced it back to the rooms embaressingly it turns out it's my PC causing the issue. Unplugging it fixes the issue straight away and plugging it back in after it's been unplugged doesn't seem to cause the issue again although it does pop up again randomly a few hours later. Rebooted and just running a virus scan now but it's frustrating as I dont want to have to rebuild my PC with a shed load of things installed and set up. Anyone got any decent ideas of how to find out what the issue is? Came back after the weekend and happened out of nowhere. Haven't done anything on my PC recently so it's a total mystery.

We currently have 20 servers and I've been learning about HYPERV recently. I was wondering what servers would be good candidates for virtualisation. I'm guessing things like Exchange \ MSSQL \ SIMS \ DCs shouldn't be virtualised as they use too many resources. I assume things like DNS \ DHCP \ Print Services \ RO-DCs would be good suggestions (obviously having a non Virtualised server with DNS \ DHCP on as well for redundency). So do these look ok? What else would you virtualise and what servers would you avoid being virtualised? I suppose the best way is to see what other people have done and here from their experiences regarding what works and what doesn't. Thanks guys.

Noticed that as soon as I got home. Couldn't edit my post!

Thanks. I'll be sending over my CV tomorrow.

Well there you go... sorted. Why it disappeared in the first place I've no idea!

Hi guys, Jut logged on this morning and I don't have anything on my desktop! It's all gone missing. Wallpaper is the same and if I naviagate to my profile my desktop is in there fine but the actual deskop on my screen... empty and i can't move things to it nor create new files on it using right hand click. Any ideas?

Is it the equivilant of sysprep.inf?

Simple question. Hoping the answer will be Simple as well! What does it do? How do you edit it? How does it relate to WDS \ MDT?

I should learn to read... the same capture image will be fine >___>

Hi, I recently learnt how to do this so it's still fresh in memory. I'll answer briefly here but if you need any more help let me know and I'll jot down something more detailed. You need to create a "Capture" boot image. To do this just right hand click on your normal boot image under the "boot images" node on the WDS MMC Snap In and click "Make Capture Image". Follow the steps and you should end up with a new "Boot Image". Make sure you enable it and then when you boot into WDS you'll have the option of which boot image to use and if you use the capture one it will load the on the computer and take you through the stages to enable you to capture a new image. You won't be able to capture an image unless the source computer has been sysprepped though. This answers your question but assumes you already have everything else set up properly. If you're like I was then might need a bit of help setting up a few other things. If you want any more in depth help then let me know.

Ah ok. I'll probably start with this then move on to SCCM later when I have the time. What is the best way to inject drivers into a Windows XP image? Oh and could someone tell me how WAIK \ MDT relate to WDS and what they both do? Thanks

So with SCCM I don't need WDS \ WAIK \ MDT and won't need to know about these three? If that is the case is it worth starting on a brand new server with no WDS set up on it? Also would there be any issues with having SCCM on the same server as WSUS? EDIT: As it stands we using Windows XP across our site. We probably won't be moving to 7 until 2012 (possibly a few test work stations this summer). Is this going to screw things up at all as all the guides I have read refer to Windows 7. I was wondering on whether SCCM would work with Windows 7?

Quick Intro I see a lot of talk with all these different deployment tools but I'm finding it tricky to figure out how they relate to one another, which ones supercede others and just in general how they work and what they do. Now I've been in IT for about 18 months now so while I feel I've picked up a hell of a lot in that time I'm still relatively green so forgive me for any inaccuracies I make in this and subsequent posts. Also the more info you guys can give the better for me! WDS, WAIK, MDT and SCCM Could someone give me a brief run down on each of these and how they work together. What each one does and whether any of them supercede the others? For example do you still need WDS if you have SCCM set up? SPECIFICS I WANT TO DO! Anyway I'll tell you where we were and where we are now and perhaps you guys could give me an idea on where to move to next. GHOST So in ye olden days we had an old ghost cast server. You'd F12 and PXE boot into RIS (on the same server), select the relevant GHOST boot image with the correct DOS Drivers for the network card then the reset was just the standard connecting to the Ghost Cast Server and capturing \ deploying an image. This worked ok for a while but I decided we should move away from GHOST because it was getting harder to find DOS drivers that worked for newer machines and this led to alot of issues with clients dropping out mid imaging\ not being able to connect in the first place. WDS So I spend a week or so reading up on WDS. Installed it on a blank 2K8R2 server and configured it. All in all it was pretty easy and took about two hours to get it up and running and capturing images. It seems to me that WDS is pretty much the same as GHOST. Create a base image. PXE boot to the network and then capture it so you can deploy it later on. Immediately though I found it loads better than the previous GHOST server because we had no issues connecting to the WDS server (well apart from one set of laptops but injecting the drivers into the boot image was easy to fix). It was also a lot quicker to capture and deploy and we had no issues with clients dropping out half way through. Also learning to use Sysprep has enabled me to learn about automating certain things with the newly imaged machines such as auto joining the domain (we still put the computer name in manually using minisetup). Can you believe in the olden days we didn't use Sysprep and instead manually connected all imaged computers to the domain and run NEWSID? Madness! I still have nightmares from last summer when I had to image 60 laptops manually one by one and running NEWSID \ Joining The Domain Manually . WHERE DO I WANT TO GO NEXT? So this is all working out pretty awesome. A lot better than the old Ghost way we did things however it's become obvious that we now have about 8 or 9 different models of PC and Laptops with pretty much exactly the same image and the only difference being they have different hardware and therefore need differing drivers. But it seems stupid having so many images for such a minor change. I've heard about the ability to create hardware independent images. I was wondering how do I go about doing this and what tools do I need? Also something minor but was wondering how to configure naming the computers once they've been imaged. So far the only real intervention we have from starting to image a machine to it being ready is to put in the machine name. What are the best ways to automate naming the computers so the correct computer gets the correct name when it's imaged? AND WHERE I WANT TO BE AFTER THIS? The next big issue we have is regarding things like Flash and Patches for programs like Seriff and whatnot. At the moment end users have to bring there laptops to us and we log them off, log on as admin and update it for them. This is a pain in the arse . Believe there is a way to use some of the deployment tools to push out updates to client computers but I have no idea how to do it and again what technologies I need to use. Can anyone help? Also I'm interested in making things a bit more Zero Touch. Possibly pushing out deployments from the server instead of going round the rooms. FIN Whoa... that is one hell of TL;DR right there. Hope some of you guys will be kind enough to give me some help with this! I know I can probably find all this on my own however I really think asking on here is going to give me the direct answers to the questions I have and hopefully some of the more experienced on here can give me some pointers and examples of how they set things up. I find it easier to see how other people have done things and working out how that works opposed to reading through a 400 page book and trying to pick out the bits I need!

Hey guys. Looking to use WifiCFG_XP.exe. I've got it working and it will setup the Wifi network however I can only get it working by using the [RunOnce] part of sysprep.inf. Because of this I have to have it boot up into Admin account one time. I believe there is a way to have it so I could have it run at the end of the MiniSetup but I can't figure out how to do this. Is anyone able to help?

Anyone?