srochford

That's the wrong SID - that just deals with machines in Windows Update - not the ID that's used for security purposes (although if the machines have been cloned without that change making then it does make sense to do that)

Attachment seems OK here but I've uploaded it with this message. If that doesn't work, email me - [email protected] - and I'll send it to you directly.sysprep.zip

OK; it's taken a bit of time but I've finally come up with a script which I think will work. I've written a blog posting to describe it - let me know if you think it will be of any use!

This is prompted by this post asking how you can script many machines to get a new SID and keep their existing name. In my replies in the post I suggested that it should be possible to script sysprep and I've now put together a script which I think will do this. I've done some testing but if you're going to use this for real then it really needs testing a bit more thoroughly! To make this work you need some way of running a script on the machine; if the machines were joined to a Windows domain then you could just use a machine startup script. I'm assuming something similar is available in Netware; if not, then psexec could be used to run the script remotely but it's hard then to make sure it doesn't run while the machine is in use (you don't want that, because the machine is going to reboot) The script attached assumes you've got a server called server01 with a share called files; in this share is a folder called sysprep which contains the standard sysprep files (download from the Microsoft website; make sure you have the version for XP SP3). You need to replace the sysprep.inf file with the one attached here. Now you need to edit the script file to match your setup - the first few lines specify the name of the server and the share as well as a username and password with access to that shared folder. The sysprep.inf file also needs editing; it should be obvious what you're changing (first password is local admin password that you want on the new machine; even if you don't want to change it, you have to set it here otherwise the process will stop with a prompt for password). Enter your own volume license key (pretty sure the one shown won't work :-)) and the names you want showing as FullName and OrgName. Leave alone the line saying "Computername=DummyName" because this will be replaced by the script with the name of the computer. Finally, if you want to join a Windows domain at the same time, complete the details under [identification]; the username and password need to have rights to join computers to the domain but don't need to be domain admin. If you don't want the computers ending up in the Computers container then include an OU and the account will be created there. The obvious next step for this is to create a database of existing computers and the OU you want them in; the script would then put the correct OU in the Identification section. This, as they say, is let as an exercise for the reader :-) If you just want the computers leaving in a workgroup then remove everything under [identification] and replace with JoinWorkgroup=WorkgroupName [GuiUnattended] AdminPassword="Really_Secret_Password" OEMDuplicatorstring=AnythingYouNeedToIdentifyThis [userData] ProductKey=12345-12345-12345-12345-12345 FullName="Maths Department" OrgName="Imperial College" ComputerName=DummyName [identification] JoinDomain=Imperial.local DomainAdmin=imperial\administrator DomainAdminPassword=ThePasswordForThisAccount MachineObjectOU="OU=NewComputers,dc=imperial,dc=local" The actual script is fairly simple. It starts by using WMI to get the current computer name and the windows folder (we're going to put a flag file in there) It then tries to check if the script has been run previously; we don't want to keep setting up a new SID everytime it starts. It does this by looking for the flag file. If the file is found then it reads it - there should be a SID in it. This is then compared to the current SID. If they're different then the script must have been run (or something else has changed SID which is what we want) so the script quits. A drive is mapped to the server and all the sysprep files copied to the local machine. sysprep.inf is updated to include the name we want for this computer and then the current machine SID is written to the flag file. Finally, sysprep is run so that it will force a reboot and a mini-setup which handles the SID change and domain join etc. The GetSID function basically uses WMI to find the SID of the local administrator (only account you can guarantee to be present!) - everything before the "-500" is the bit which identifies the machine and will change when the machine SID changes.

Are you sure they weren't pulling your leg??? Fitting a camera to count pages seems pointless when pretty much all printers have paper detectors to tell when the paper has gone through successfully! The HP software even tells us how many dots of each colour are put on the page (and I'm pretty sure that isn't done my a man with a coloured pencil making the dots :-)) Nashuatec is a pretty well established company although they mainly do "big" printers; they're now part of the NRG group (I think the other two bits are Ricoh and Gestetner; I'm sure that the older ones here will remember the Gestetner name!)

It would be messy, but you could have a logoff script which captures the wallpaper setting, stores it (eg) in the user's home directory and then a logon script to put it back.

We lease a lot of printers (all big HP multifunction devices; the company is DTP group) I'm not sure of the cost but it is basically a fixed cost per quarter and then a (relatively small) charge per page and they provide all toner and maintenance. Most companies will do something like this - Kyocera do it, for example. You may be able to do it a bit a time; there's normally no need to replace everything and you do get things like pull printing (where you just send the job to a print queue and it prints wherever you log in or swipe your ID card) included.

No, I didn't get that wrong but BETT did - check out the titles on the web pages. Looks like they took last year's site, updated the content and missed the TITLE tags (eg this page although it looks like the site is very busy and has been unavailable quite a lot today) If only they used a content management system - perhaps someone should show them Joomla :-)

Dabs are always pretty good at delivery; I've regularly ordered late in the afternoon, specified the 3-5 day delivery and the goods have arrived next day.

Intriguing :-) The high performance computing web site is there (we've got quite a lot of the HPC stuff) as (I think) is the rest of the site if you know URLs (Google is your friend ...) they've always sold a mix of stuff but their good stuff is as good as anyone else (eg real Intel motherboards, vPro etc) and their support is excellent.

Chrome and Safari are both showing it right aligned; IE7 is centring it. Don't really want to criticise the web site because the content basically looks pretty good, but do you *really* want scrolling text? How well will it work for someone using a screen-reader (and even if you think no-one using your school website has a visual impairment, DDA means that you ought to be making reasonable adjustments for them).

I do appreciate that you come from the North, but could you please translate that for us softy southerners??? We generally like sentences with verbs and nouns and things in some semblance of order :-) Other body parts are those described here Suddenly, Dolmio for tea does not seem so attractive ...

Could be a mickey take of the fact that many people here don't bother with punctuation in any meaningful way :-)

Some time ago I'm sure that Aruba/Netgear announced that they would work together on some things. The only thing I can find now that vaguely refers to this is here - but it's not quite what's wanted. Many of the ProSafe Netgear APs are running Unix (I think it's FreeBSD but don't have one handy to check) so in theory could run whatever code you want

Not quite sure why he wants the password - are they asking for the machine to be returned? If so, I'd guess they want to log on and test it or, if they're sending someone out to fix it then I'd guess they have a standard test procedure on site and they don't want to be in a position where they can't log on to a machine.

Don't worry; it's still rubbish :-( Installed it on a sacrificial Dell E6400 laptop. Installs pretty quickly, initial appearance very much like Vista - not sure if that's good or bad. Not all drivers found - not a problem - so go into "Devices and Printers" to see what can be done. There's a quite nice layout and clear warning icons on the areas which need attention. Right clicking gives a "troubleshoot" option so I try it. First thing it finds is a problem with the driver for the SM Bus Controller and suggests that reinstalling the driver might help. Good suggestion so click "Apply this fix" and it tries to reinstall the non-existent driver. After a few moments I get a message telling me that "problem with device driver - fixed" and a nice green tick. At the same time a system tray message says "Device driver installation failed" I know what's going on here - I just need to get the driver from Dell - but I don't think that the conflicting messages would help anyone who didn't know what was going on so not really sure of the purpose!! Copying files is about the same as Vista - pretty quick on the local disc but very slow over the network (just dragged 320Mb from my home drive to the C: drive - it's now got up to 1.2Mbytes per second but it's really not impressive. A lower spec XP machine is roughly 10 times as fast at copying the same set of files over the same network.

I'm sure it will work and it's quite a nice idea. I'd imagine that you would tie-wrap the network cable to the power lead so that you've effectively got one wire going to the mains socket(s) The powerline system must be behaving like a network hub; this means that you are limited because the bandwidth is shared. They're claiming 200Mbit; when that's shared out you're going to get much less but it should still be way better than wireless (which will also be shared and starts at 54Mbit at best) Check the size/shape of the powerline blocks and the two way sockets you're thinking of using - you need to make sure it all fits. How much are the laptops (I never trust companies that don't put prices on their web sites!)? I'm guessing you do need splash proof for lab use but sometimes the extra tough laptops are a stupid price and it might be better to just buy spares of more basic machines and accept that some will die.

I think a massive amount of care is needed here! You can't just run newsid and leave it there; I'm pretty sure that will break the link to AD (the SID for the computer is stored in AD; not sure if that's the only link but it won't be good to have one SID on the machine and another in AD) You could have a machine startup script which ran newsid and then rejoined the domain using netdom. Another alternative might be to use sysprep; provided that there are no local accounts on the machines you won't lose anything (domain profiles will be fine, any files created by domain users will also be OK because the ACL will contain a domain SID and that won't change) What I think you could do is use a machine startup script to generate a sysprep.inf for each machine (it's going to fairly straightforward; the only thing that will be different is the machine name and that's going to be the same as the machine is now). I don't think you even need to run mini-setup - the hardware hasn't changed - you just need the "regenerate security identifier option" Logic would be something like: Have I already been sysprepped (check for flag file or registry entry) - yes, quit Copy sysprep folder from server and edit line with computer name to match "my name" Run sysprep and force reboot at end Machine will then restart, sysprep itself and join the domain Next time the machine starts up on the domain it will find it's already been done and not re-run the process I'd really, really want to test this carefully :-) Not sure when the domain was first set up but although MS have always said that you must have unique SIDs in a domain, I think it was only really Active Directory that made it essential (and possibly not even until Server 2003). Certainly, back in the NT days, it didn't seem to matter.

sorry; shouldn't type stuff late at night when I can't test the code! objfso.movefolder strUNCStart & "\" & objSubFolder.Name, strUNCStart & "\archive\" I missed a comma missing between the source and destination. You don't need brackets with movefolder; you do need them with deletefolder and I don't know why :-( These are links to the MSDN item on deletefolder and movefolder - they have examples and docs.

Aaaarrrrgh :-) You've got this far with the script, just take a bit of time to get the rest of it done! The key bit is here: If strADPres = "Present" Then EchoAndLog Date & "," & Time & "," & strUNCStart & "\" & objSubFolder.Name & "," & "Folder/User is ok." Else EchoAndLog Date & "," & Time & "," & strUNCStart & "\" & objSubFolder.Name & "," & "Folder/User is bad. User Not Found!" End If This is writing to the log file the good/bad folders so you just want to add something to delete the bad folders - it could be as simple as: objfso.deletefolder(strUNCStart & "\" & objSubFolder.Name) added after the "else" or (to be safer!) you can do objfso.movefolder strUNCStart & "\" & objSubFolder.Name strUNCStart & "\archive\" (make sure you have a folder called archive under the root of the home folders - eg if the server has d:\home\user1, d:\home\user2 etc then make a d:\home\archive) This isn't perfect - the next time you run it, it will try and delete the archive folder - but I'm afraid I've not got time to work out how to specify a better location in that script. I'm sure that by the time you need it again your scripting will be good enough :-)

In the past, I've used functions like the ones below to handle drive mapping/unmapping. they make sure the drive letter is not in use before attempting to map and force a disconnect. the unmap checks to make sure the connection is there before trying to unmap. You can just call (eg) MapNetworkDrive "G:", "\\server\share" when you want to map and UnMapNetworkDrive "G:" when you want to unmap. Sub MapNetworkDrive(sDrive,sShare) sDrive=ucase(sDrive) Set clDrives = oNetwork.EnumNetworkDrives For i = 0 to clDrives.Count -1 step 2 if ucase(clDrives.Item(i))=sDrive then oNetwork.removenetworkdrive sDrive,true,true 'force and update profile exit for end if next oNetwork.mapnetworkdrive sDrive,sShare,false 'don't update profile end sub Sub UnMapNetworkDrive(sDrive) sDrive=ucase(sDrive) Set clDrives = oNetwork.EnumNetworkDrives For i = 0 to clDrives.Count -1 step 2 if ucase(clDrives.Item(i))=sDrive then oNetwork.removenetworkdrive sDrive,true,true 'force and update profile exit for end if next end sub

As Localzuk has said, I'd guess this is about trying to separate code from design. Not sure what this is being used for, but if it's going to be visible to the public then you need to be concerned about accessibility. With css doing the work, you're making it easy to have (say) different style sheets for people with visual impairment who may just want text without the image. Much easier to just have a style sheet handling all of this stuff

It depends :-) If you redirect my documents etc to a network location then they are "protected" by the recycle bin (as you have found) but "normal" network files are not. You may want this to happen; in which case do nothing. If you don't want this to happen then you can turn it off - set a value NukeOnDelete to 1 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\BitBucket and all deleted files will be deleted immediately rather than being recycled.

Does the laptop have an ExpressCard slot? If so, then take a look at the AverMedia card A friend of mine has one which came with a Dell laptop and it's been brilliant - he previously had a desktop with a Hauppauge card and even with an external aerial reception was poor. The Avermedia card has a small aerial but it "just works" :-)

Remember that global warming melts the ice at the pole. That cold water then trickles down the side of the UK making it rather colder than it used to be...