GoldenWonder

I haven't had the thing running long enough to update it! I've got it back up now and reset the root password. Now I cannot set any other user as an administrator! When I check the option (logged in as root) 'Allow user to administer this computer' it simply unchecks itself! No error or a clue as to why.

Hmm forget reinstall, the damn thing won't even boot! Root password is no longer recognised and I can't boot from the install DVD. Time for a call to apple support I guess!

I guess wiping the thing completely and starting from scratch will be my best option, thats a half term job! Not impressed so far with xserve, I've got windows servers that haven't been rebooted in months (and then only due to power cuts etc) and this has been down about 10 times in 2 weeks!

Hmm,I was quite enjoying my foray into the world of Macs but this damn xserve is becoming a nuisance! Every week or so it dies, becomes unresponsive and the message that the Startup Disk is full shows on the console. Rebooting it works fine, but at that point I always get an errors trying to get to the Server Preferences: "An error occurred while trying to get the server's status. Authentication succeeded, but an error occurred while trying to get the state of the server. Try connecting again." EDIT - it says this even if I enter the wrong password! I can access Workgroup Manager as normal.This has happened before so I basically restarted all of my OD/AD settings (which meant recreating the User preferences etc) but I don't want to be doing this every week! As I'm a mac virgin and short of time, has anyone got any pointers as to what might be going on with this thing?

In the end I use WGM to add the shortcuts to their dock - took longer to work it out, but then I realised you have to open the location and then drag it into the WGM!

Thanks - I'll have another look at the WGM, I think I've only scratched the surface of preferences as they seem a lot more basic compared to Group Policies, so there must be more to it!

OK, so I'm getting along quite nicely with our new bunch of Macs. All working nicely on the domain and picking up preferences from our xserver, but theres a couple of niggles I can't seem to find an easy solution to: 1) How to get rid of the Open Office registration nagging screen for every user who logs on? 2) How to put a shortcut on the desktop for All Users (like XP!) - this would be a web site link or a link to a shared folder (SMB:\\server\share) Is there an easyish way of doing either of those?

Well I've found out what was causing this, and its a bit of an odd one. It wasn't any policy settings, it was a drive mapping in the login script that pointed to a DFS share (ie net use w: \\domain\share) - only when the user had the new 2008 DC as their login server did this hang. By using a derestricted user I could see the login script hung on the 'net use' mapping command with a prompt saying 'Enter user name for:' which was why the desktop never appeared. Odd thing is this drive mapping to the DFS share has been in use for months (there are 2 2008 servers on our domain with the DFS share on) and the problem only happens since we promoted one 2008 server to DC, and even then it only occurs when the user gets that DC as their login server (and they aren't an admin, as the admins have the same mapping and it works every time, no matter what logon server you get!) So its such a convoluted set of circumstances I'm baffled: - You have to be connected to the 2008 DC as logon server - You have to be a non-admin user - You have a 'net user \\domain\share' statement in your login script Match those three and your desktop will hang - whether its XP, W7 or Vista! Anyone know why it is asking for a username for the mapping statement?

I'm going to try and promote again - not sure how to check which server a user is logged onto as they have no access to cmd etc, and I would normally use SET to find this Edit: Checked the logs an replication seems to be OK. I think the whole promotion is working fine - its just clients are hanging when they are using it as their logon server, which brings me to the SRP idea. I run a program at login to log when a users has logged in - this is running ok, so login scripts are being processed by the look of it

The fact any admin user (who has limited policies and no SRP) can login with no issues proves it must be a policy setting, but only when theres a 2008 DC available! I still think it might be the SRP blocking staff/students from running something at login - but I thought 2008 server only need the usual sysvol and netlogon whitelisting

I've just put in my first 2008 server into my 2003 DC domain and promoted it to a DC. (After all of the forestprep etc) and all seemed to go ok. A day or so later we notice various random XP machines fail to login, hanging at a blank blue desktop (the same colour as the one we use in the group policy). You can still logoff using CTRL+ALT+DEL to get the dialogue though. Also, we also have a batch of Windows 7 machines, most of these hang at the 'Preparing your desktop' stage, before staying at a blank black desktop (you can still logoff as above though) This is only happening for Staff and Student users, i.e not admins like me so I thought it might be our software restriction policies. We use whitelists and all DCs are listed in there (i.e \\server\sysvol and \\server\netlogon are Allowed. Also allowed is \\domain.name\sysvol and \\domain.name\netlogon) It seems to hit the Windows 7 machines a lot more, presumably because they will 'favour' the 2008 DC over the 2003 DCs (1 2008, 4 2003) Nothing shows in the logs of the failing machines (the last message is that folder redirection was successful) so its tricky to work out whats going wrong. It has to be something to do with the new 2008 DC, because as soon as I demoted it, the logins all started to work ok (Windows 7 and XP clients) Anyone any ideas? Is there another path I need to whitelist for 2008 DCs?

Well for the first time in my IT career I'm giving up.It doesn't work and there doesn't appear to be a resolution. I don't like giving up but I've wasted far too much time on this half-baked rubbish! Its going back for a refund, not fit for purpose. Problem is any old cruddy software gets the 'education' and 'network site licence' labels shoved on it, when the tech support have never even tried it on a network. Useless.

No, nothing - I think its not even getting to the point of begining the install. The event viewer only shows it was successfully 'assigned' - thats it until you reboot the machine (I think the gpo times out after 30 minutes). No errors are logged in the event viewer and with Debug/verbose logging enabled on the policy nothing it generated. Its almost as if it hangs immediately the installation begins.

What a crock this software is! I've tried my own package, their package and god knows what in between. Result is that any PC that begins the install hangs - disgraceful for so called commercial software. Tech support are about as much help as a used teabag. Anyone else using this miserable excuse for an application?

Well I'm going to try and build my own msi and see what happens - I've evene edited this package with Orca and it seems OK, no errors etc

It doesn't have an administrative option, but when I run it with the /qb option manually it installs ok. It seems to be it will only install when run directly, which defeats the point of giving you an MSI in the first place. Tech support for this is a little err, vague shall we say.

No theres no patches or transforms or anything else, just a simple MSI (of around 200mb)

Got an odd one here. I'm trying to install Revelation Sight and Sound using a group policy (as I do for countless other packages) An MSI is provided so bunging that into a GPO and deploying was easy. All the PCs detect it and then start to install ('Installing managed software...') However, thats where they stop - nothing happens from then on. I've even left one for 2 hours and it stayed at that point. The event viewer only shows that the assignment of the policy was successful - no more messages are logged after that. Rebooting the PC is the only option at this point. As I've got 500 PCs to put this on I would like the automatic deployment to work! Odd thing is if you manually run the MSI it works fine, installs the program and the program works OK. Anyone any ideas what I can do to trace the problem?

How is this going to affect each local authority I wonder? Surely a BSF scheme that was designed to incorporate say 25 schools cannot be scaled back down to just include the 10-15 that are in the process of being finalised now? I'm guessing each LA proposed an ICT solution for ALL their schools, so how are they going to scale this back to only suit the ones that have escaped the axe? Personally I was wary of BSF purely for personal (i.e TUPE and redundancy!) reasons but the idea behind it was sound. Now some really shabby schools won't get rebuilt when they should be. Fortunately our schools buildings are pretty good, if old fashioned. Hopefully the worst schools in the country will have been targeted in the early phases and will continue to be rebuilt.

The app itself (I wrote it a few years back!) simply uses the Winsock control to send the packets. Guess winsock is not supported in W7 as it must be mangling the packets in some way (as they're being sent, just not waking up the target PCs)

I ran wireshark on the W7 PC whist it was generating the WOL packets, and I can see them being spat out. I notice the program that generates the packets runs massively slower on the W7 machine than on the XP. I.e on the XP machine it sends out packets for approx 700 machines in about 30 seconds.The W7 takes at least 5 minutes and hangs regularly. Ironically this program worked 100% OK when tested in Vista.

I've disabled the firewall on both PCs (the test recipient and the W7 sender) - using a monitor I can see the packets aren't arriving. When I send from the XP machine the packets do arrive!

I'll be interested to see how this pans out. Are they scrapping the scheme completely (apart from the ones in an advanced stage) or simply changing the way it will work? Typically the muppets on the Sky News forum are on slagging off the lib-con alliance, conveniently forgetting it was the labour government who 'spent' this money even though it didn't exist knowing full well the next government would take the flak for cancelling it!

Theres next to nothing running on the W7 machine - its a new install. I've also tried using Debicus's WOL tools and a monitor on the remote machine to see if the packet is arriving. We can remotely shutdown the PCs from the W7 (using the shutdown.exe command)

I'm not explaining this very well! Its actually the machine that sends the WOL packets that is W7. If I send the WOL packets from my XP machine, all of our PCs wake up regardless of the OS they have installed. If I send the packets from the new test W7 PC, none of the PCs wake up!