alexsanger

Yeak, looks like thats what we'll do for now. It'd be nice to have all the components broken down so we can pick and choose bits when we do bare metal installs - save on storage space too. Its kinda supposed to be the point of MDT, but as with all things microsoft getting from the idea to actual real life implementation is all a bit fidly and time consuming. If we solve it I'll try to remember to post an update here. Cheers.

Currently getting MDT up and running for deploying OS and applications packages. Wondered if anyone had any experience or success deploying Adobe CS4 using MDT? We have used the Adobe Uber Installer to create the package, which works in perfect silence locally. Pushing it out using MDT we get "an unspecified error". We'll plug away at it, but I was hoping someone might have some hard-earned wisdom on the subject!

Thanks for the chuckle - it would be nice if DFS could be set to propogate NTFS permissions based on the namespace or replication settings though. (Unless it can and I don't know...).

If you have not moved the desktop folder from its default location within the mandatory profile folders then you do not need to specify any folder redirection. You can redirect the desktop to any location you wish. The desktop folder only contains shortcuts that you would want to appear on the users desktops. If you don't want them to make changes, only give them read permissions on the folder and turn off active desktop and so on. To achieve this you do not necessarily need to worry about a mandatory profile. You only put the path to the .MAN into the Profile Path of the user details in Active Directory. It does not need to affect the desktop redirection. If the entire profile is stored in this location just as it was created (all folders are in the default locations) then you can specify the path in the user details in AD, and you do not need to redirect the desktop folder. The advantage to using a redirected folder is that you can modify it on the fly, and the changes are instant, rather than requiring the users to log off and back on. Hope that helps.

You need to save the profile that you have made mandatory on a network share that the users have read access to, then set the path to this share as their profile path in AD, as you would with a roaming profile. You can redirect the Start Menu and Desktop folders seperately in Group Policy in the same way as My Documents and App Data, and customise them as you need. Easiest way is to set up a test user with the profile path you want to use for the mandatory profile. Give the user admin rights and log on with it. It will create a profile in the specified location. Log off, and change the users permissions back. Meanwhile, browse to the newly created .DAT file and rename it .MAN Combined with your redirection settings you should now have a mandatory profile ready to use.

Depends what you want to do. /LOG: writes a log file to disk. Usual options are "/copy:DATS" to copy all files with Data, Attirbutes, Timestamps, Security settings. add O for Ownership to be copied aswell. This MS Technet guide is quite handy. Robocopy

Even top brand tyres cost less than my insurance excess - I know where I'd rather have my money go...

I knew when I posted that someone would correct me! OK, so, very few games utilise more than two cores - granted, that will be more and more as newer games are coded with multicore processors in mind. I still say that for the budget, and for a gaming PC you should save the money on the processor and spend it on a graphics card. Frames per second and texture fill rates are what you need for games - at least for me, preferring FPS or racing games. Anyhew, I think this might make interesting reading. My gaming rig has become almost exclusively that now I have moved house. General stuff I do on my lappy, I have a Win7 mediacentre connected to the TV, and a noddy box for downloads and network shares, so my focus for my next games machine is purely gaming. I wish I had the money for an i7, and even an i5 system starts to bump up total system costs a lot, so an overclocked i3 will probably form the basis of my next gaming box. With a decent graphics card like a GTX560Ti it'll spank an i5 with a GT440 oh no he di'unt!! You'll have to decide what your machine is going to need to do, and spec it accordingly. Let us know what you plump for and how it turns out.

If this is primarily a gaming rig I would save money on the processor, as no games utilise more than two cores, and spend a bit more on the GPU to improve what ends up on the screen. Personally, I'm longing for a GTX 560 Ti at the moment. Or, for bang for your buck an HD 6850 if you would consider ATI. Sure, an overclocked i5 might get you more bragging rights, but you won't see any gaming performance benefit over a well configured oc'ed i3 system. Current Rig: MSI P6N SLI, Q6600 @3.0GHz, 8GB OCZ SLI P6400 5-4-4-15, 640Gb WD Black, 1TB WD Green, 2x Geforce 8800GT SLI, Nesteq ASM 600W, Coolermaster Centurion 534

Aria PC are a good bet, as already mentioned. Their pre-overclocked i3 bundle is a steal at the moment on their super specials. It has also had great reviews, and my technician used it for a system build for a friend and said it absolutely flew. I specced up a gaming rig using that as the starting point for about £600. Not bad for something that'll match an i7 in everyday use and gaming scenarios!

The onus will still be on the teacher to respond to prompts for any that do not run completely automatically. Better than nothing though. How about a £50 USB HDD for the server? Performance and fault tolerance really aren't issues, so it might just do the job.

I've experienced two very good reasons for not ignoring updates over the years - Sasser, and Conficker. I'm still reaping the rewards of my predecessors overlooking the importance of a good update policy on this network some 8 months later...

I would still use WSUS, so long as you have enough storage for the downloads. If this is going to be supported remotely I would set up email notifications wherever possible. That way you can sort things pro-actively, rather than waiting to break-fix. Keeping permissions tight will reduce the chances of software problems, and you look good for reducing the support overhead for the teachers. Perhaps set them up an admin account to use separately if needed, but have all normal user accounts secured.

No admin rights of any sort for any member of staff other than the techs! Not even local admin - which does after all have the permissions to remove the computer from the domain, hence compromising network security. Power User is the most anyone needs, and even then that gives enough permission to install all kinds of junk and cause problems. You'll be expected to support whatever is installed on the machines and sort out whatever problems it causes, so you should be the only one to install any of it. It also allows control over the software catalogue, and keeps you on top of licensing.

No worries! Good luck with the new servers

@sparker Been doing some more reading and people are reporting pretty slow throughput with the 410U. Are you using it iSCSI? If so, how are the transfer speeds for you? Thanks in advance.

Thanks for the feedback. Might see if we can squeeze an 8tb QNAP out of the meagre budgets, but not before checking out Thecus. Cheers guys.

Got all the server roles covered, just need the storage, so might see how that stacks up cost wise compared to a self contained NAS box. Thanks.

Hope you gave him somewhere to hang his stetson and tether his horse while he did all that hard work!

Short and sweet! Interesting if a little pricey. Transfer speeds good enough for large scale multicasting? Edit: Actually, found QNAP TS-410U 4TB NAS Server with iSCSI, which seems pretty reasonable. Any opinions? Thanks

Hi All, Currently planning the new virtualised server structure and intend to implement WDS to image and manage the desktop estate. Quickly realised storage for this and things like backups of software are going to push the limits of our SAN rather too soon, so wondered if anyone had any experience or knowledge of good NAS solutions? Ideally looking for rackmount, about 4Tb to start with, and needs to play nice with AD (Vanilla W2k8) and needs good transfer speeds. Look forward to your thoughts

How are your server resources? This sort of thing started happening after upgrading our ancient SIMS server to SQL2008 - many stressed office staff, a meeting with Business Mgr and LEA support team = shiny new server :-) and everyone happy.

The RDP setting “Allow connections from all clients” worked for me when I had issues from XP clients to a 2008 SP1 box. Not using thin client though, so just a suggestion.

Agreed - looking at expanding our SAN with an eclosure of SATAs for file shares and keeping the 15k SAS drives for VMs and SQL. Depends a bit on how you set up the disk pools, virtual disks and RAID settings on a SAN though. My last place had SATA drives in almost all the servers - not my spec, but for the most part it was fine.

Layed off the coffee at work since the doc suggested I might have a lazy immune system, so switched to tea for all the anti-oxidants! 4 or so cups a day I reckon. Still have to have a coffee for a kick start before leaving the house (or speaking, showering or anything that requires any thought), then just enjoy the aroma of the coffee pot in the "base" before flicking on the kettle and brewing up. I have induldged in a bean-to-cup espresso machine at home though, which is great for the weekends. Waitrose Espresso Beans make a damn fine cup, I find.