ajbritton

And of course there's always ASSM (Assigned Software Sequence Manager) to change the order of installs within a particular GPO.

I seem to remember repackaging Textease without any problems...

Way to go!

Interesting. We use NTBackup on upwards of 100 servers and although I could not say we never experience problems with backup, I can't remember a single one which was down to a problem with NTBackup itself. Retrospect seems to say that it works by using incremental backups all the time (progressive). Does this mean that you never get another full backup? This would worry me greatly. What if the tape with the first backup fails? I've looked at the user guide on the website and it looks scarily complicated!! Proactive backup does look clever, if it can't finish the backup in one go (during it's scheduled period of activity), it will carry on next time, but I suspect it's only really needed in complex setups with many servers. I like the simplicity of NTBackup. It backs up files. It restores files. You can script it. It doesn't try to do lots of magic behind the scenes which, should it go wrong, leaves you covered in poo. The last thing you want when your server dies is to have to spend another day reading the manual, only to discover you forget to tick the box that says 'I might want to restore my data one day'! I suspect most schools based techs don't have the time to perform regular disaster recovery test runs.

NTBackup cannot backup 'live' SQL servers, but if you are going to script everything then you could either stop the SQL server prior to backup and start it again afterwards or better still, you could run a TSQL script to backup the databases. AFAIK, NTBackup can only backup open files in conjuction with ShadowCopies.

If the installation needs to reboot the PC, why would you want to prevent it?

Microsoft acquires DesktopStandard. What future for the free version of PolicyMaker Registry Extension one wonders.

That's handled by SIMSPERM.BAT

For what it's worth, I use RDP to connect to servers and then VNC onto workstations as required. There are a couple of VNC wrappers which make getting onto PCs easy. One is GenControl, the other is ChrisControl (a very clever compiled AutoIt script). ChrisControl gives you the option of using RDP or VNC, and will connect to an existing VNC server if it's installed. If not, it will push UltraVNC onto the PC temporarily. I'm connecting from within a broadband consortium grid so I'm not so worried about man-in-the-middle attacks. It works great. Now that 2003 servers are out there, it's even possible to connect to the console. I also use RoyalTS to manage my RDP connections. It's fabulous. The other tool I recomend is VNC Neighbourhood as a way of finding PCs running VNC server. You can even modify it to add extra remote management tools.

Thanks everyone. I had a great meal out and sank a few glasses of wine. I guess I can relax now until the big 50 starts beckoning...

It's my birthday.. Woo hoo! I'm 40 years old.. Doh! Not surprisingly it doesn't feel much different to being 39 (or 38, or 37 etc...), but I'm looking forward to getting nicely tipsy and eating loads of chocolate. Senility beckons...

I've done my own AutoIt script which I'm hoping to test soon. If it's OK and anyone is interested then I'll post it. It's designed to be used as a GP assigned Startup Script and does the following... - Check for SIMS already installed. If not, then install SIMS (including running SIMSPERM.BAT) - Modify the SIMS.NET shortcut so that it just calls Pulsar.exe - Runs SIMSLOAD.EXE All the SIMS components (SIMSInfrastructureSetup, SIMSApplicationSetup & SIMSManualSetup) run silently but a simple progress bar is displayed to show the user that something is happening.

My home town is on WiKipedia also!!

I just ran SIMSLOAD at startup and that seemed to do the trick.

ROFLMAO

If only! I think what's needed is some kind of webcam monitoring system which detects the user at logon and then auto logs off when that user is no longer appearing on the webcam for more than a few seconds. Other than that, some kind of physical token which has to be inserted in the computer.... OK, here's a thought... 1 - Get a cheapo USB key and put a file onto it which is recognizable. If you wanted to be posh, maybe you could make an MD5 hash of the users name combined with the volume name of the USB drive. 2 - Write an AutoIt script which checks for the presence of the file in the USB drive. (and verifies it if you went down the MD5 route) 3 - If the file is present, it launches SIMS. 4 - Using the AdLib function, the script can check for the presence of the file every 5 seconds or whatever. 5 - When the file is no longer present, the script can kill SIMS and/or log the user off. Penalties for lost USB keys must be high for this to work however. If this sounds like a workable system, then I might have a go at writing it... EDIT: It occurs that this idea could be for the entire logon session...

That's one of the great things about EduGeek, you don't get one answer, you get several. Of course, thats not always a good thing

I do the lot. GPO setting + UPHCLEAN + DELPROF /Q /I /R.

Nice. I'd just make one slight modification by using command subsitution directly in the FOR command but it's a matter of personal preference. for /F "usebackq tokens=1" %%a in (`at ^| find "shutdown.exe"`) do at %%a /delete at 21:00 /every:m,t,w,th,f,s,su %SystemRoot%\system32\shutdown.exe -s -t 0 -f Anyway, there's still the problem that this only works for domain clients. For P2P you'd probably have to install some kind of ssh daemon. Nice one! I did try doing it like that, but it's the first time I've used a FOR loop for anything other than looping through the file system. I learn something new every day!

What about using a startup script to add scheduled task to shutdown the PC. I've not tried this, but it should be possible with something like this... at | find "shutdown.exe" > %temp%\atlist.txt for /F "tokens=1" %%a in (%temp%\atlist.txt) do at %%a /delete at 21:00 /every:m,t,w,th,f,s,su %SystemRoot%\system32\shutdown.exe -s -t 0 -f Basically, it first deletes any AT scheduled commands that mention SHUTDOWN.EXE and then adds a new one. Just a thought!

Serious Deja Vu! You're nearly there by the sounds of it. I found that sometimes the silent switches don't quite work though and needed an adhoc function in my AutoIt script to watch for file overwrite confirmations and automatically hit OK/YES.

Sounds to me like the site has had 2 DCs at some point (possibly during an upgrade where the new server is added). It is possible that the RID master FSMO owner is still the old server. IF this is the case, then you can seize the RID master FSMO role (see www.petri.co.il for details on FSMO roles).

Unless you are NICEIC registered, you probably aren't allowed to do this are you?

I thought SIMS installed it's shortcuts to All Users anyway. There is a policy setting which prevents users from seeing the content of the All Users start menu/desktop; are other shortcuts from All Users appearing?

Well, if GPResult/GPMC says the policies should be applied then I guess they should be applied. Is it the case that they are not applying to TS sessions, or on PC sessions?