Andi

Yeah that's exactly what I'm afraid of... If it goes as planned then great, if not my AD schema is screwed and it's a reinstall & restore. Not something I'd like to do really if I can at all help it.

Is it really as simple as this article makes out? I presume if so that I just need to make sure I run the upgrade on both my DCs? http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/48807/48807.html

Excellent! Thanks for that.

Any more thoughts or experiences with this? I've just got my license key sorted and was wondering whether there's any sort of packaged or silent install option available? Is the software any good?

Surely that's illegal for a start!

Never happened to me.

Well at least it would appear that the software on the CD no longer requires local admin access. That is making my install much easier this year. Still having to go around each requested station, but it's only about 15 so not a massive issue.

Is that the kind of tool that would help me route their traffic after they're VLan'd? I'll look into that, thanks Geoff.

Our school is a boarding school so I guess works much in the same way as many halls of residence. Until now boys have been able to plug into the network point in their room, they get assigned an IP via the domain DHCP and away they go. The only real bit of security we have setup is only one MAC address is allowed to plug into that port using the managed switch. This setup gives me shivers as although they aren't on our domain, they are still in the same address range. Ideally what I want to do is setup a VLAN for their ports giving them a completely different IP range which only gives them access to the terminal server or the internet. I'm not quite sure how to set this up, but it's definitely one of the projects I want to get started on asap.

We fitted a brand new network on the existing cabling/fibre architecture coming up to 2 years ago. Basically we bought new servers, wiped CSE off the old system and setup a vanilla 2003 network with XP clients. Eveyrone is much happier with the new system compared to the old as it is much more industry standard and so far much more reliable. *touches wood*

We had similar issues with getting blacklisted, but I was advised to set out Exchange server to send mail via our ISP as a Smarthost. We haven't had the problem since.

Interesting, thanks.

I keep getting an issue where my terminal server is getting clogged up with gigabyte beyond gigabyte of user profiles? Surely this isn't right is it? What have I set wrong? We use a vanilla 2003 server XP client network, with roaming profiles. Some rooms have terminal clients in them which connect to a 2003 Windows Terminal Server using Thinclient. I've read somewhere that I need to set a different profile for users to use when connecting to a terminal session, but if I do that how will it affect the end users?

An incremental backup will backup files since the last incremental or full backup. The backup type you describe is a differential backup. Ah yes, so it is. Oops.

It won't ask for them, but yes that's the basic idea for a standard file restore. Restore the full backup first, then the each individual incremental since.

My advice would be: Run a weekly full backup on it's own tape. Then set daily incrementals to append to another tape. The incremental backups will naturally be smaller, therefore you are more likely to fit them on one tape. This may well change depending on the capacity of your tapes and the amount of data you are backing up. If you have no backup done then do a full as soon as you can until you have worked out a backup plan.

Append will add the backup onto the end of the tape until there is no longer any room. An incremental backup will backup any files that have changed since the last full backup. The two aren't related in any more ways than that. Unless I've misunderstood the question.

Thanks, I've changed the line you mentioned so that it reads: ' Connect to AD Root. Set objRootDSE = GetObject("LDAP://ou=Network Computers,dc=Monmouth,dc=LOCAL") but the line after it: ' Get domain name. Set objDomain = GetObject("LDAP://" & objRootDSE.Get("DefaultNamingContext")) now complains with the error 'The directory property cannot be found in the cache'.

Well I thought that it might be easy to decrypt the script, so I only sent it out over the matter of a few days, making sure all stations were turned on during this period, then removing all traces of the script. At least it's only the local admin password.

Yes, this is exactly what we do, aside from ours being stored on a standard share. I didn't think the size/network traffic would be an issue, but I just thought I'd ask. I'm sure there's a way to sort out the empty links though.

This is the VBScript that we encoded and set as a startup script via GPO. Obviously you'd need to replace 'password' with whatever password you want. Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") objShell.Run "net user administrator password"

Microsoft have a script encoder for this purpose. I've zipped and attached it. We changed all our local admin passwords via a vbs startup script using an encoded script. script_encoder.zip

How do people do this? Currently I have one start menu for students and one for staff, which are redirected via GPO, but I'm concerned with just how much network traffic this is causing with everyone requesting this data several times a minute over the whole network. I frequently check that no executable etc have been put in there and only lnk files so that the file size is as small as possible but I'm still concerned, especially for our wireless clients. Another concern that I do want to find a way around is the fact that a lot of the links on the start menu will be broken if the station doesn't have the software assigned to it. Any pointers or tips?

What problems are likely to be caused by this? I set this folder to be redirected quite a while back and have had no issues yet that I can think of. Is there any easy way to set it back?

I'm later than usual with my hayfever this year, but I started last week. We get free prescriptions here in Wales so I'll have to make myself a doctors appointment, but until then it's the cheap Tesco versions of hayfever tablets, or the BOGOF Zirtek. One-a-day just isn't enough, I'm usually on about 3!