Duke5A

Right here. Never used GPO for shortcuts though; I've always been a VB kind of guy. Set objShortcutUrl = WshShell.CreateShortcut(strUserDesktopPath & "\Shortcut Name.lnk") objShortcutUrl.TargetPath = strPath objShortcutUrl.IconLocation = strPath & "\icon.ico" objShortcutUrl.Save

Are you logged on as a domain admin? Are there multiple DCs at the site? It could have something to do with replication if you're able to create and edit to your heart's content, but are having problems going back to it after it has replicated. Check the Delegation tab in GP edit on a policy you're having trouble with and ensure you have the correct permissions.

You should be able to use the print management console on the print server. The trick is the x64 driver has to have the exact same name as the x32 driver that is already installed. The versions can be different, but not the name.

I'm assuming you're building an XP image since you're dealing with HALs. No you can't add the drivers, WDS only supports driver injection on Vista and 7 images. You'll have to sysprep the VM again with the drivers added to the mass storage section of your sysprep.inf. As far as the HAL goes, which one did you use? If you used the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface then it's only going to utilize one core on multicore systems, and ignore hyperthreading. This could also account for why WDS isn't allowing you to image the machine with this image. Instead, make your VM a multiprocessor systems and build your image with the ACPI Multiprocessor PC HAL. Then use this line in your sysprep.inf to specify the HAL type: Now the image will downgrade to the ACPI Uniprocessor PC HAL type on single core P4 machines, and use the multi on hyperthreading enabled processors and multicore rigs. Also, if you're placing your sysprep file in the image directory on the WDS server, be sure to strip out any lines in your sysprep.inf regarding partition setup. WDS does this on its own, and having these options specified will bork image. What'll happen is it will work on some hard disk geomoetries and not others. It will usually result in a BSOD after the first reboot (mini setup). These are the lines you'll want to remove... Good luck.

Anybody else having issues with the Microsoft provided HP Laserjet PCL 5 drivers? I just spun up a new 2008 print server in a VM and created the ques by hand (old print server was borked, so using the migration tool was not an option). Everything seems to work fine, but I've started getting some complaints from my users. Apparently they can print, but only one copy at a time. If they submit a job to the printer, and specify two or more copies, only the first will print. There are no errors in the print que when finished, and this only effects HP printers using the MS PCL 5 driver. After digging around, I found that it's a feature called Mopier Mode that is causing this. If the printer has sufficient memory to store the entire print job, only one copy will be sent to the printer to cut down on network traffic. It sounds like a good idea in theory, but the problem is the printer's installed options are being detected incorrectly. When the printer is added, the installed memory is reported as 128MB, a printer hard disk and duplex unit are listed as being installed, and it believes there is nine paper trays. The vast majority of these printers are Laserjet 1200 and 1300 series printers, and they all have 8MB of RAM. To make matters more interesting, the smallest amount of memory you can specify is 128MB. Color Laserjet 4600s are also effected, but there is a PCL6 driver available for those printers. When switching over to it the installed options are detected correctly, and Mopier Mode is turned off by default. So everything is peachy with PCL6. Problem is, there is no PCL6 capable driver for the 1200/1300 lasers for Windows 7/2008 Server from MS. The only option is the universal print driver from HP, and I've had nothing but issues with that. That is why I'm on an MS only provided driver kick. So my short term solution is to disabled Mopier Mode on all the 1200/1300 printers. It fixes the issue, but I'd like to fix the underlying cause of the installed printer options being misreported. Anyone else been down this road?

We also have shares by graduation year, and the student's home folder created inside of that share. Permissions are handled at the NTFS level, while everyone is given full access through share level security. Students are given every permission to their respective home folders with the exception of full control. I had an issue a few years back with students taking ownership of the directory and removing access rights from administrators. Easy enough fix, but it was causing issues with the nightly backups.

I know; it's and old post, but I thought it worth mentioning. The MST that Rammie posted works like a charm on Java 6u24. I've been able to successfully deploy it through AD to a couple of test machines. Auto-update, along with the other crap stays disabled.

This is driving me nuts... I'm developing an app that will need to access and edit registry keys on a remote system; which mostly works. I can create/edit/delete values, and create registry keys, but cannot delete keys. This is a domain environment, and all the necessary rights have been granted. I can use regedit from the box I am writing the code on to connect to the test machine's registry, and delete all the keys I want, so the problem has to be with my code. Does anything stand out to you guys? Every time I run this portion of code, it bombs out with "The procedure number is out of range." It doesn't seem to matter if I call it from MyReg, or regKey. Any ideas guys?

I cleaned this a few weeks ago off of a friend's machine. Had the exact same problem, spawning a pair of IE processes and playing audio advertisements in the background without them actually being visible. Someone is trying to run up their click-count on web ads. I made a couple of passes, first was a MalwareBytes scan booted from a BartPE disc, then with Security Essentials, and finally ComboFix. The first two methods, while finding a lot and removing it, don't seem to be able to deal with root kits all that well. ComboFix dealt with the ever spawning IE processes.

You might want to go to HR and get the laptop back into the district's hands. This could set a precedence that allows staff to keep old hardware and you might find yourself responsible for wiping and setting up a stock load on every one that goes out the door. I work educational IT as well, and it is a standing policy that staff does not get to keep, or even buy old systems. We keep them for as long as their useful, then recycle them. In addition to that, before they go out to recycle the drives get pulled and I drill two holes in them.

I'm using WDS for image management and deployment. Haven't touched MDT (plan on messing with it eventually) since I prefer to build my images by hand and capture manually. I build my reference images in a VM on an ESXi host, roll up driver support for multiple hardware specs, and install common software. All other software is deployed as MSI packages via Group Policy.

It's a shame too, they used to be a good drive until about the time they bought Quantum. After that it was all done hill from there. I remember opening a brand new 10GB Maxtor drive on Christmas only to find a re-branded Quantum in its place. It died four months later...

Western Digital's image has started to tarnish with me, especially with 1TB or larger drives. As far as Samsung goes, they are all I use anymore. At home my NAS has four 1.5TB drives in it and stays powered 24/7 with not a single issue with one year of ownership. At work I've got a total of about 200 Optiplex 780s with Samsung 160GB drives with a little under a year of service on them, and I have yet to replace a single drive. In defense of Stone, they probably get those warranty replacement parts from the manufacturer of the computers. As mentioned by stonej, you're only real recourse is to demand a different brand. If not Samsung, I've had good luck with Seagates as well.

The DOS version of Ghost is really fading away. Rolling up LAN drivers and SATA support into its boot disks is a pain to keep up to date, not to mention the performance hit you're noticing. It was mentioned earlier in the thread to create a BartPE disk, and trust me, this is the route you want to go. If you purchased a copy of Ghost, then it should also have a copy of Ghost32 included. This version runs under a Windows environment and you'll notice a significant uptick in speed. Additionally, updating the BartPE disk is as simple as finding Windows XP drivers for the hardware you want to support. And even though not all of your clients support PXE, I would at least setup a PXE boot TFTP somewhere on your network. I did this at my work and used the daylights out of it. Follow this guy's guide to making BartPE PXE boot friendly if you want. Howto boot BartPe from pxe on asus eeepc - no cdrom, no usb stick. (Page 1) / Eee PC and Windows XP / EeeUser Forum

I'm sorry guys, I should have included some more detail. The student WLAN is in its own VLAN with a 23bit subnet. The problem is that this WLAN spans six sites and available addresses are on the very edge of being used up (recently had an explosion of additional wireless netbooks added to the network). To add another WLAN and subnet, or just giving the existing student WLAN a 22bit mask is going to entail configuration changes on our core switch. This is something I know that needs to be done, it's just a matter of getting the vendor over here to do it. CatOS, especially on something in production, is a little over my head. Anyhow, here is an update after upping the lease time to 8 hours. I'm still getting reports of the testing software occasionally spontaneously quitting out and dropping the student back to a desktop. Event Viewer paints a slightly different story this time though. There are no DHCP related events to be seen, only the last one from my first post. Even though the DHCP issue in Event Viewer is cleared up, I'm still at square one. Further checking WCS reveals the utilization rates to be low on the access points, but some of them have upwards of thirty associated clients. Even though I'm still not entirely convinced it's a congestion issue, the only other option I see right now is to enable aggressive load balancing on the Wireless Control Server for the access points. Maybe forcing clients to another AP when a single AP has more than 20 associated clients to it might help things out. Thanks guys and I'll keep you posted. I won't be able to try this out though until Tuesday.

This one has me scratching my head a little. I work educational IT, and we use wireless quite extensively at the schools. Just a couple of weeks ago, we rolled out new student testing software for evaluation. It's nothing complex, just runs off of a share on our NAS, students answer a series of questions, and results are recorded. It can be a bit traffic intensive though, and the majority of students are using netbooks connected over G wireless to take the test. Loading times for the test software to come up aren't that long, and once it is running, performance isn't an issue. Just a couple of days ago though I started getting complaints of the testing software unexpectedly closing, and dropping the students back to the desktop. Checking the system log in event viewer revealed a couple of hints... And then right after that entry.... And finally... So I can see exactly what is happening. The client's address lease is expiring, and it can't seem to contact the DHCP server within whatever the timeout period is after it sends a renewal request. The address gets dropped, and TCP/IP connectivity goes down. It sounds like a congestion issue, but I'm certain it isn't. There are no more than 15 clients associated to each access point, and the Cisco WCS reports low utilization on said access points. To further help things along, the one and two MB data rates on the B/G radio have long since been disabled. Aside from this issue, I can find no evidence this being a congestion issue. To patch this issue for right now, I've increased the DHCP lease time from two hours, to eight so it'll last the school day without having to renew. I'd still like to know what in the world is causing this. Any ideas guys?

Sure is... Place this at the end of your Squid conf... Give the default Squid conf file a read around line 1350 for a full explanation of options. You can pass credentials as well if your ISA box requires authentication.

This is probably your issue right here. I had the exact same problem at home with an HTPC rig. Try this... Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices Properties > Advanced (under speaker settings) > select Desktop Speakers

I've got a WinPE image available for use in WDS for this stuff. It boots up straight to a command prompt and I use imagex for capturing the WIM. Once I have the WIM on a network drive I import it into WDS.

Web filtering is provided by the ISD here, and they're using McAfee Smart Filter I think. From the inside I have a Squid proxy that authenticates against the Active Directory for student traffic logging. The internal Squid proxy uses the external ISD proxy as a cache peer. After some kinks were worked out it works remarkably well.

It's almost as if the quickest/shortest routed path is down or flapping, and it is falling back on a gateway of last resort or a higher cost path. If you don't control that network segment this could be a real pain to fix.

Not so much expertise to add this, as just joining in on the rant. I've got a couple friends who have invented new words to describe that software. Thankfully those phones are in short supply where I work. For the few people that have them, there only option is to sync calender and contacts from their computer. The standard work phone here in the office are Droids. I still can't figure out why Black Berry phones need this horrible front end to interface with Exchange when Apple iOS, Droid, and Windows Mobile do it right out of the box.

Same setup here, Deep Freeze with Endpoint 11 going on a little over year. The daily maintenance period handles the AV updates, and WSUS updates very nicely. From one educational IT guy to another, I highly recommend it. Can't give any input on Oracle however....

For now it doesn't look like the site preview feature is supported under their SSL search. Just wanted to say thanks to Oxide... I immediately checked this out when I got to work this morning, and the maintainers of our proxy service already seem to be on top of this. Thanks for the heads up though!

Don't mind setting it up yourself? Use Squid for your proxy, and SARG for reporting. You can set it up to authenticate to the AD so traffic will be logged by user name. It's free, and if you're even semi experienced with a Linux command line it'll take you about 40 minutes to setup from initial load to end configuration. I've been using it since the beginning of the school year and it has been pretty good. I've had some bugs to work out, but nothing that bad really.