Duke5A

I run one WSUS instance that caches updates for about 1500 workstations across seven sites. The sites are connected via Gig private fiber, so no worries about having a downstream WSUS install on each site. Security updates are set for auto approval as I don't have time to do testing of any sort (one man shop). I haven't seen a WSUS install out of the box that hasn't needed tweaks done to it's application pool in IIS. The application pool process will keep crashing until raise the limits on resources it's allowed to consume. Been an issue in Server 2016 and Server 2019, might even go back farther to be honest. Can't remember which settings, but can look it up on my install if you need.

A product called Deep Freeze from Faronics might be what you're looking for. Every time the computer is restarted it'll go back to a blank slate and the Deep Freeze client can handle Windows Updates on a set schedule.

Take this one step further and map a drive to the full path of said folder. Make it a persistent connection for the user. If they travel between computers then you could use GPP with item level targeting.

I'll do you one better: our high school in Yahoo's business listings features a sexually explicit image of two Disney characters. Since Yahoo farms out their business listing management I have no idea how to remove it. I've called their support, sent emails, etc and have been ignored. I'm sure they would listen if we paid for their premium listing service though.

Slashdot has some info on this: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/02/09/2241212/suspicion-and-anger-towards-microsoft-rises-after-windows-10-search-failure I guess even if a search is local is still depends on cloud services. ...God I'm so happy to be running LTSC.

I'm using ExacqVision on two servers, each with about 90 cameras. It's service only consumes about a 1GB of RAM and it's CPU usage is negligible. I don't think it does any transcode operations during recording or viewing. All of our cameras are POE Axis cameras that use either MPEG2 or H264. Pretty good piece of software. Not one of numerous things I have to worry about.

https://osticket.com/ Open source ticketing system used by a neighboring district and we're in the middle of moving over to it. We like what we see so far and even have it authenticating against Google Suite via third party plugin.

Sounds like this kid is going to get into trouble no matter where he is placed. The people whose job it is to deal with this situation, who are payed to do so and have the requisite training are trying to offload him onto someone who doesn't. If something does happen while he is under your care you won't have any protection and will be tossed under a bus. Stay away from this with ten foot pole.

The previous admin at my work installed ADCS on a DC and it when it came time to decommission the DC it made the task far more complicated. Sure, a lot of times the recommendations from MS are simply to sell more licenses, but this isn't one of those times. Domain controllers typically have short lifespans due to wanting to upgrade before support even runs out and you cannot perform in-place upgrades on them. A member server with the ADCS role has a longer shelf life, and I believe it can be upgraded in place. Stick it on a member server - your future self will thank you.

What is wrong with the built-in slideshow screen saver? Its default photo path is the Pictures folder in the user's profile folder, but it can be changed, so that setting has to be in the current user hive of the registry somewhere. Find that key. Create a GPO: Specify 'PhotoScreensaver.scr' and in the same policy use GPP to create/modify the registry key that sets the path and point it to a UNC path for your file share.

Smart 11.4 drivers will load in Windows 10, but the interaction is buggy. I get around this by replacing the drivers with ones pulled out of a 2014 installer. Smart Drivers 2014.7z

Do these machines have both onboard and offboard graphics? I've seen some real goody things happen when the onboard is left enabled in the BIOS.

We've got about 250 staff with laptops that we just refreshed two years ago. Dell Latitude 3490 with the USB-C dock. So far I haven't had a single occurrence of theft, broken screens or busted dock connectors. Funny enough these models still use a barrel plug for the travel charger and I've had a couple staff members manage to fold over the center pin in the barrel (no clue how they managed that). The previous generation laptops were Latitude 5400 that we used for nine years. I could still count on one hand how many thefts we had. Accidental damage does happen, but wasn't that frequent. While we managed to use the last run for nine years, as mentioned already, they don't age like desktops. Busted display frames were common from screws backing out over time. During conferences at the high school it was funny watching 70 teachers fight over about six electrical outlets in the gym. Batteries last about four to five years and then started requiring replacement. Once the laptop reaches a certain age OEM batteries are no longer produced and you have to get the knockoff brand they barely lasted for 45 minutes. If you can commit to a five year replacement cycle, then laptops are great. Anything over that and supporting them gets harder and harder on an order of magnitude for each passing year. As to the durability of USB-C connectors, I haven't had any staff laptop docks break yet, but have had plenty of the ports on Chromebooks break. I love the fact that the industry picked a standard finally, but USB-C is not durable in the slightest. Another note, I've got quite a number of staff that just forgo the dock and external display altogether.

All four drives most likely didn't fail at the same time. It probably started with one and you lost additional drives as the controller attempted to rebuild. If all the drives are of the same vintage then you may have reached the end of their duty cycle. Are these SATA drives by chance? How heavy are the read/write operations? If I'm correct, then RAID 50 is probably even worse since it has parity. Parity operations add a lot of overhead and are more stressful to drives during a rebuild. The rest of the original drives may not be far behind. If these are in fact SATA and have lead a hard life, you should seriously think about replacing them with SAS. No RAID configuration is going save you at this point. At least this is how I'm interpreting these facts. As stated, it's awfully coincidental to have that many fail around the same time.

This is a pretty big clue. If I had to guess somewhere during the upgrade process the local admin account was used as a template and copied over the default user profile. You used to do this by setting the setting in the sysprep XML to true. Whenever a new local profile is created on a client the default profile is used as a template. It's located here: c:\users\default\ntuser.dat This can be fixed relatively easily. In regedit, you'll have to load registry hive from the default user profile, search for that path, delete the value of that key and unload the hive. This will fix the issue for users that don't already have a profile on that specific client. For existing users, you'll need to do the same thing for them, but won't need to mess around with loading/unloading hives. This will by located under HKEY_CURRENT_USER somewhere. Clear as mud, right?

Been on Win10 as a standard now for the last few years. Our ancient hardware seems to run OK with it. Teacher laptops before they were replaced last year ran LTSB, and now the new ones including the old student desktops run LTSC. The backbone of our desktop fleet are Optiplex 780 desktops with a few labs of 790s floating around. I got almost the entirety of the back end up to at least 2012R2 with lots of 2019. The thing that has be losing sleep is our hosted Exchange server. 2010 running on 2008R2. I'm trying to push us off into Google seeing as we already have a Google Apps domain all the students use and a good chunk of the staff. If not, I think I'm going to be standing up a new Exchange server before the end of the month. God I hate Exchange... - - - Updated - - - Been on Win10 as a standard now for the last few years. Our ancient hardware seems to run OK with it. Teacher laptops before they were replaced last year ran LTSB, and now the new ones including the old student desktops run LTSC. The backbone of our desktop fleet are Optiplex 780 desktops with a few labs of 790s floating around. I got almost the entirety of the back end up to at least 2012R2 with lots of 2019. The thing that has be losing sleep is our hosted Exchange server. 2010 running on 2008R2. I'm trying to push us off into Google seeing as we already have a Google Apps domain all the students use and a good chunk of the staff. If not, I think I'm going to be standing up a new Exchange server before the end of the month. God I hate Exchange...

I would think if the array had survived it would still be available in Windows even during the rebuild process. You said you lost four drives, it wasn't one from each set was it? Did the array ever come back? I've personally had a drive with faulty firmware in an array with take the entire thing down, even though it was a single drive in the array that could have survived multiple failures. Partition became corrupted from garbage being injected into the array.

That's a good question. I had to tweak IIS settings for an out of the box WSUS install on 2019 to keep it from crashing. You'd think that MS would have fixed this stuff by now.

Running Symantec Endpoint AV by chance? Had this issue a little while ago. https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.tech256047.html

Some sort of telemetry gathering. Looks at device drivers and installed apps. If I had to guess probably something that precludes a feature update.

I'm wondering if this is more related to DFS than anything else. I haven't used DFS in years though. Are you mapping the drives through GPP? Try item level targeting to detect if the client is in a defined AD Site and if it isn't, then skip the map.

Not that I'm aware of. Best you can do is add your driver and then Windows figures out what is best to use if there are multiple options. If Windows does see multiple drivers matching a device's hardware ID then it checks the driver date first prioritizing the newest, then moves to the version if the dates are equal. I actually ran into an issue a few years ago where the wireless driver that ships with Windows 10 for Dell DW1510 wireless cards had a severe bug that made wifi almost unusable. The driver from Dell worked fine, but had an older date in the signature. Windows wouldn't prioritize the Dell driver on imaging. What I had to do was remove the driver that Windows ships with from it's driver store. That fixed the issue. Outside of that the driver management in WDS has been enough for me. Just import your driver into the WDS console and it'll hand it out to the appropriate hardware during the imaging process. Really no need to build the driver into the image so as long as you're using an MS imaging solution.

Still doing it the old way with WDS. I build the image in a VM with all the software loaded and use sysprep with an answer file. I'm using LTSC so I don't have to go back into it very often, but when I do it's just Chrome and security updates mostly. After the image is captured I revert to a snapshot taken right before sysprep. There are some post image tasks that are defined in the sysprep answer file that run on a first login that is also automatically done via the answer file. Everything is over the network. Time to image a box with an SSD on a gig link is about 20 minutes. It's old school, but it still works for us and I haven't seen enough of a reason to change over to MDT yet. Probably will next time I rebuild the utility server.

I've got these three checked on WSUS: Windows 10 LTSB Windows 10 Windows 10, version 1903 and later Might be more than what is needed, but LTSC picks up its updates.

I've attached a 7-Zip archive with everything needed. Just unzip into '.\Program Files' or some other place. The files themselves were pulled from 2015 LTSB media. Cheers! Sticky Notes.7z