Duke5A

We use a lot of netbooks in our district, and many are in carts of 30. Every year we image them with a fresh load. The process goes like this: Pull out netbooks and hook up all thirty to a switch hook up the switch with a single uplink to the building LAN PXE boot netbooks with WinPE from WDS setup up another laptop or desktop on the switch that has a local copy of the image and start a ghost cast server Run Ghost32 on the netbooks and join the session unplug the uplink to the building LAN so we don't flood the network with broadcast traffic start the image process once the image process finishes the uplink to the LAN is plugged back in so the machines will join the domain install software using scripts Rinse, lather, repeat for other carts You can even modify WinPE to auto start Ghost to join the session once it comes up if you want. Our XP base image is only 5GB with Office installed so the entire process only takes 40 minutes with a gig switch. As a bonus, this can all be done off of battery power, so no need to break the cart down.

Your experience with laptops in your district will vary as opposed to others; it's highly dependent upon how the staff cares for them and how rowdy the students are. While I can agree they are in fact no replacement for desktops and not as durable, netbooks are at a price point that make them more of an attractive option. For $400 USD we were able to get Dell Latitude 2120 netbooks outfitted with Atom 550 processors, 2 GB RAM, 160GB HDD, Windows 7 Pro, three year hardware warranty, and one battery replacement. The cost of a standard Optiplex 780 with a comparable warranty sits at about $800 USD for us. As far as damage and theft is concerned, out of 540 total netbooks we have yet to have one stolen and we've had to replace six LCD screens due to damage in a span of a year and a half. And while I wouldn't run CS5 on them, they have more than enough horse power for web browsing and Microsoft Office. Wireless congestion is probably the biggest headache though, and we have had our share of problems. We do have a full district wide wireless network with a central Cisco Wireless Control server. The absolute largest improvement you could make would be to disable all of the 802.11b data rates to force the clients to associate higher. Just one or two devices that associate at slow rates can bring an entire carts worth of netbooks to a screeching halt. After this change most of the congestion problems have been solved and students don't have too much of a problem with using them. Our very time sensitive VB login script also manages to map all of the shared drives and install the printers correctly on every login. If you don't have building wireless, then two access points bolted to the top of the cart should be more than enough. I'm not advocating netbooks as a desktop replacement, but they are absolutely great for filling in the gaps, especially when space is a concern.

We use netbooks quite extensively in my district. The high school has four carts of 30, the middle school has five carts of 30, and the elementary schools all have two carts of 30. The systems we use is Dell's Latitude 2120 model; which is a more durable netbook design with a rubber exterior, 2 GB of ram, and a dual core Atom 550 processor. We still have the occasional vandalism and unintentional damage here and there, but it has been largely mitigated by the means of a sign out sheet and one person who is responsible for loading and unloading the carts. Students never go into the carts themselves and the carts are checked over upon removal and putting them away. When damage is found, it is as simple as going to the sign out sheet to see who had it last. For buildings that don't have a lot of room netbook carts are the best way to go. I was apprehensive about them at first as I used to prefer desktops over everything else, but they grew on my and haven't been anywhere near the support nightmare I thought they would be.

Will it actually PXE boot as in Ghost will start up and timeout looking for the Ghostcast server, or is PXE boot is failing altogether? If it's failing to PXE boot, I would check and make sure DHCP options 66 and 67 have been defined in the scope. Without these the client won't know which server to contact, and what file to use to boot with. If Ghost is timing out looking for the server then I would suspect issues with multicast traffic being able to traverse VLANs.

We just recently changed our content filtering setup. Both teachers and students were using the same proxy, but we split them early last year. Teachers now have access to everything except for sites that match malicious and pornography lists on the filter, where students are still locked down with no access to personal pages, social media, and youtube.

An Ubuntu install with Squid and Dansguardian works wonders. If you install them through the repository they come mostly setup from the beginning and only require tweaking. For an added bonus, setup Webmin to administer it through a web browser and use third party block lists that are regularly updated.

Check DNS, maybe you've got a duplicate host name. When the client tries to connect to the server it's seeing it already has an active connection from another host that resolves to the same name and it swats it down. Since you've blown off the machine a couple times now the problem has to reside server side.

My bad, I goofed on the command and the post is too old to modify. netsh dhcp server export all c:\dhcp.export[/Code]

You can backup your entire DHCP config to a single file by dropping to a command line and typing this: netsh dhcp server export c:\dhcp.export You can exchange export for import to pull the scopes back in. I would imagine DNS would be just the same.

I'm having a real bear of a time getting this to work correctly. I've got a Squid proxy setup that authenticates to AD, and does AD group based filtering. It all works great, but I can't get the custom access denied pages to work. The way I have it setup right now is if a student is a member of a specific group for restricting Internet usage they will only be able to browse by means of a white list. For this specific ACL dealing with the white list I want the customized denied page to show when they try and browse to a site outside of that list. All that I can get to show is the default access denied page. deny_info ERR_CUSTOM_ACCESS_DENIED NoInetAccess http_access allow WhiteListSites http_access deny NoInetAccess all Now, if I take the "all" of off the end of third line then I can get custom error page to display, but the browser will prompt for credentials. If the line is left as is, no prompt will be made, but the default access is denied page is displayed. This is driving me nuts. Anyone out there been through this once? Thanks....

It sounds like you have authentication enabled for both Squid and Dans Guardian. Why not turn it off for Dans Guardian all together? When I was still using DG on my Squid proxies, it would run on port 8080 while doing some basic content filtering, and then pass of connections to Squid running on 3128. Squid would require authentication to go any further after that. For user's web traffic history we would reference the Squid logs.

The copyprofile option in the unattended XML works for me. I installed Win7 into a VM, enabled the built in local administrator account, and created a second local administrator to do all my work out of. The only time I ever step into the built in local admin account is when I need to make changes that will be included in the default user profile. Here is my answer file. true My Organization My Organization en-us en-us en-us en-us en-us en-us true true true true true XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX * mydomain password joinaccount mydomain OU=ComputersWDS,DC=mydomain,DC=COM password false true 1 ITLocal true true Work 1 ITLocal Administrators ITLocal password false Eastern Standard Time en-us en-us en-us en-us en-us For some nagging reason I remember reading something to the effect that the built in local admin password needed to be set the same as the secondary local admin that was created. Don't quote me on this as I set this up over a year ago. Sysprep is ran with the oobe, generalize, and unattend command line switches. I hope this helps.

I would be willing to bet WDS is ignoring it since it's Home edition. You will be able to make this work though if you're willing to let WDS go. Just role up a BartPE or WinPE image and use Ghost32 for capture and deployment.

This site will give you just about everything you need to get your CCNA. Router Alley - Home The labs and guides were written by the professor that taught my CCNP courses in college. Hit up eBay for some used equipment and start practicing at home. You can score 2500 and 2600 series routers pretty cheap from eBay.

The HAL hasn't really been an issue with Windows XP deployment for a while. The ACPI Uniprocessor and ACPI Multiprocessor HAL types are interchangeable. If you build your reference image using the ACPI Multiprocessor HAL and set the sysprep answer file correctly, Windows XP will flip over to the ACPI Uniprocessor HAL when a single CPU is detected. This will make an image that can accommodate, from a HAL perspective, first generation Pentium 4 based desktops all the way up to the current i7 offerings. The only problem I've experienced with this setup is first generation Pentium 4 mobile chipsets require the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC HAl type. Since you can't go from the other HAL types back to this one, your reference image will be incompatible with these types of laptops. We don't use any laptops with early P4 mobile chipsets anymore so it hasn't been an issue.

Are all the machines you're building this for use Intel processors? Do they all use Intel chip sets? And have you ever modified the mass storage section of a sysprep answer file? I built and maintain an XP base image that works with a dozen or so models of machines, both Intel and AMD based. It is possible, and once setup it's easy to maintain.

What are you using for a firewall/router in the office? If it's something like an ASA or Pix, it might only be licensed for so many concurrent connections. Skype will keep a persistent connection to its servers, so the firewall will never timeout that computer's session. With web traffic though, you're not sending/receiving until you click on a link or refresh a page. The session you had will timeout on the firewall, and the next person to try and get out will be able to.

We're going through this same headache right now. Our guest WiFi is segregated from the internal network, and we have a DHCP server in that subnet that doubles as an auto proxy configuration box. Auto proxy configuration is setup using scope options in DHCP for Internet Explorer, and DNS for Firefox. Filtering is handled off site by our ISD. The initial redirect page when you first connect gives our terms of usage, as well as instructions for setting up popular browsers for auto config. Really though, the entire setup is held together with bailing wire and chewing gum. When it does work, it's OK with PC based system, but iOS is a coin toss. And once the session timeout period has expired, it is next to impossible to get back on. I've sort of given up and I don't think there is a real reliable way to set this up and have it just work. I'm thinking of doing away with the auto proxy setup, and just putting the proxy information in the terms of usage page. It'll cover all popular browsers and devices, and included a bolded sentence that reads, "this wireless service is provided as is, and leave it alone.

We've had issues with wireless getting bogged down before with netbook carts and have implemented a couple tweaks to alleviate the congestion a little. 1) If your wireless system is centrally managed, then disable the slower data rates. If all your devices are 802.11G or better, then flat out disable all the 802.11B data rates. You would be surprised how much faster this can make wireless when using entire cart of 30 netbooks for web browsing. 2) Enable "Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon" in GPO. It'll take a few more seconds to get to a logon prompt, but the system will wait for the wireless connection to associate instead of using cached credentials. This setting can be found in Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System/ Logon. 3) Tighten up the code in the VBS script as much as possible. The less code the client has to crunch the better. I would start by doing away with the separate if/end if statements for all the different computer names and go with If/ElseIF statements. Good luck!

For MSI creation I use Admin Studio Professional. For a goof ball app like this it sounds like you're best bet is to do a snapshot comparison instead of watching the actions of the installer. This method will take a snapshot of the system before and after the install, compare them, and roll up the differences into your MSI. Use a clean machine with no antivirus, and all unneeded services disabled for this. You don't want to include other system related changes in your MSI. And I would make sure the visual c++ distributable pack and visual basic run times are already installed. When it's time for deployment, deploy the visual c++ pack and VB run times on your target machine before running your captured MSI. Good luck...

Do you have the Win7 32/64 bit drivers loaded in the print server?

Your absolutely right. I finally just got around to implementing this and it works great. Thanks again!

This post is also handy for configuring ISO booting through PXE Linux. http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=4669

Sorry, I should have thought about this part too. Put this into your unattended XML for WDS, along with the changes to the WinXP sysprep.inf.

Hey, sorry I didn't see this sooner. I haven't been stopping by this forum as mush as I used to. I've got this working and booting BartPE ISO files, DBAN, MemTest, and a few other utilities. The ISO and IMG files are located in "\WDSRemote\Boot\img" and here is a snippet from my PXE Linux menu config file. The winnt.sif file specifies the location of the BartPE ISO and is located in the root of the boot directory. Let me know if you need anything else. I'll be subscribed to the thread so I'll get email notification of replies. Good luck!