ajbritton

Unless I'm mistaken, Capita no longer support Win2K so I would be surprised to find Win2K installers in the updates... Then you are mistaken, but not by much. Capita are effectively ending support for Win2K clients in Feb '08. The Infrastructure Update is supposed to include the .NET 2.0 update however. @Geoff: Thanks for that. I'll edit the post.

It's official. The current SIMS .NET Infrastructure Update download does not include the .NET 2.0 installer. There is a thread on the SupportNet Technical forum entitled 'Infrastructure Update - .NET 2 ??' with details. UPDATE: SupportNet link

An interesting article in Technet Magazine about EFS and offline files. I had thought that encrypting the offline files cache would be sufficient to protect it against all but the most sohisticated of attacks, but apparently not so.

I've now had a confirmation from my post on the Capita support net (from a user, not Capita themselves) that the currently available version of the SIMS .NET Infrastructure Update does not appear to contain the .NET 2 installer required for Windows 2000.

Funnily enough, I used this today for the first time as well. I converted a MS Virtual PC image to a VMWare Server image with no difficulties whatsoever. Good stuff this VMWare...

Yes, it is possible to allow Windows Installer to have elevated rights. If the MSI were digitally signed, then this would be very easy.

@ArchersIT: Have you tried the 'Grant exclusive use...' tick box on the redirection policy?

If the Admin and Curric domains are part of the same forest, and the Admin domain is the forest root, then taking it away will (I'm 95% certain) have serious repercussions for any domains remaining. I mention this because that is how I set up schools which I support. If it is the case that the Admin and Curric domains share the same forest, and the the Admin domain is the forest root domain, then it would be necessary to retain a domain controller for that domain. This could be done using a virtual server if there is a physical server with the necessary spare resources.

lol. SIMS-SECURITY-BYPASS.BAT might be more meaningful.

Indeed, there is a SIMS batch files called SIMSPERM.BAT, which will grant the necessary permissions for a specified domain group (eg SIMSUSERS). The permissions are required to enable SIMS to to upgrades to itself.

Oops, silly me! I should have said that the other option is to use the 'Grant exclusive use...' option on the redirection policy. This should grant the user (and Administrators) Full Control on the folder! Not much use if you want staff to be able to put files in those folders however!

If you a distributing copies of a single file to multiple users it might be easier to let the users get their own copy by posting the file in a public read-only area. When files are backed up, the security information should be included in the backup. A restore should put back the same security information. This is possible with NTBACKUP, ROBOCOPY (and I'm fairly sure BackupExec could probably do it as well) If you are putting personalised files into users folders then I can see that it would be a problem. I guess in that case you have to answer the question is to which is more inconvenient; pre-creating folders with particular security on them or changing the security or owner information on files after you copy them in. It would be fairly trivial (but not very elegant) to have a script go through the folders and reset security every night for example.

That's certainly how it works with Office. You apply the full file patch to the admin install and re-deploy.

I think the reason that does not work is that the SIMS installer tries to write files to the central SIMS folder (eg S:\SIMS or \\SERVER\SIMSROOT\SIMS) even when instructed just to do a workstation install! The only way around it I could see would be to cache the entire SIMS folder onto the C: drive and install from there. Robcopy could probably do this reasonably efficiently...

Maybe a full backup prior to the upgrade would be in order...

I would be great if the installer could download the updates to the PC/laptop using BITS and then run the install in the background. This would help deployment on wired as well as wireless networks.

I have had to create a silent installer for the SIMS Infrastructure Update and have turned up something interesting in the process. It appears that the .NET 2.0 is not included in the package. Yes, I know that .NET 3.0 includes .NET 2.0, but this cannot be used to install on Windows 2000, which is why the .NET 2.0 should be there. I'v I would be interested to hear from anyone who has successfully used the Infrastructure Update to update a Windows 2000 Pro PC and has positively identified .NET 2.0 as having been installed. It's not a particular problem for me or the sites I support, but if it is the case that the update does not do what it says on the tin, it raises concerns over the quality of the testing that the package received. If anyone is interested, I can PM them breakdown of exactly what is in the package and how to extract the individual files. This makes silent installation a lot easier!

I've deployed Easiteach 3.3 via GPO with no problems. Have you tried the RM support site?

Hmmm. A good idea until the staff figure out that they can email the shortcut to anyone and it will work!

Where to begin?!? With MSI, deployment/upgrades can be handled from a central point. No need to visit the desktop to install. Every app that cannot be deployed automatically is a PITA. MSI will allow upgrades to take place without granting a user local admin rights (or having to run SIMSPERM.BAT which almost amounts to the same thing). Other MSI benefits such as self repair, advertising. I honestly would not describe a standard install as simple. A simple install is either an assignment with Group Policy, or a double click on a shortcut to a silent installer. Anything more complex than that does not cut the mustard. To be honest, you don't need to provide an MSI, just installers that will work reliably in 'silent' mode. Installations can then be done using startup scripts or MSI wrappers which we can take care of ourselves. By all means wrap up all the 3rd party bits with a GUI for an attended install, but document the contents and give us access to the individual bits so that we can deploy them in the most efficient and reliable manner.

I have an old Dell PowerEdge Xeon as a server running Wise, and a Viglen 3GHz P4 with 2Gb RAM running VMWare server. The Viglen will happily run 3 XP VMs or a 2K3 VM and an XP VM simultaneously. All this is on a subnet behind a smoothwall router running on an old Elonex. I manage it all remotely.

If all your email accounts are on the same domain eg [email protected], then you need to set the Default Recipient Policy to update the email addresses in your AD accordingly. That way, when emails are send, the reply-to will be set to the appropriate address. This will only work well if your user account names in AD match the setting on the pop accounts eg AD account '[email protected] ' uses pop mailbox '[email protected]'.

Nice one. I had a quick go at this product a while ago but could not get it working.

It might be worth cobbling together your own control panel with all the required applets. This could be done is VB Express or even an AutoIt GUI. It would then be possible to launch this single app in the security context of another user and then use any of the applets without having to re-enter security details each time.

You can certainly develop packages using virtual machines. I've built literally hundreds using Virtual PC and VMWare. It makes creating a clean machine as simple as clicking the mouse.