SHimmer45

if you load the MDT without using WDS does it work. if its failing to find the partition to image to i would check your task sequence closely as it might be that the disk setup isnt quite right. for your default profile you need to specify the copyprofile option which i cant see in your unattend. (i set this to be applied when the image is applied back to the machine) how i have done MDT&WDS is to create your MDT task sequence and unattend and just use WDS to push the MDT boot file to the client. i dont use WDS for anything other than that. So you should have one "unattend.xml" file.

or this imo

personally id still have 1 physical DC somewhere but then thats personal preference

last time i looked we dont pay alot for ranger as we dont have the support contracts (not that they have done any really changes for a long time) abtutor site looks like it borked.

last time i looked these were still a fair few £££ even after adding a case for these small itx systems

fan reasonable quiet?

what one did you go for?

FM2+ a little overkill for what i need i think and its alot more expensive. more investigation required i think it will come to to what i can get the best deal on.

always been a bit of a fan of the small low powered systems. has any one got / used / experience of AMD's am1 platform Intel Baytrail Celerons Intel Braswell pentiums (i was thinking that these might be suitable for some hyper-v / vmware home labbing as some support VT-X) AMD's are cheaper as usual but they can sometimes lag on single thread stuff these days. My AM2 Athlon 4050e is starting to feel a little leggy and is often ramping up to 40-50 watts fan spinning like a goodun when youtubing for example, it might not be helping that chrome dropped support for the gfx offload for ati 4000 series cards a while back so defaulting to the CPU

Ranger still is great for realtime monitoring, screenshoting and the logging. we still use it for these purposes along with AD policies and the like. if a firm made a product with the realtime logging screenshotting and the other good bits ranger does for decent cost they would be onto a winner. not sure if imperio does / did allow you to purchase specific modules to to this with a reduction in cost?

appletv's are VERY chatty on a network, dont play well with proxies / filtered internet connections as they are a home product. you can get HDMI to VGA converters but these are £50 a pop. when we started rolling appletv out into rooms with old projectors we told the budget people that upgrading the AV in the room was 400-500 depending on type of projector required due to room size. (inc the cost of the appletv).

its VERY short sighted to not include yourself in discussions about the IT of the school, without a solid foundation a school cannot progress its usage of IT. Ipads imo are a short term add on to a schools ICT resource. schools have to be a little careful storing confidential items offsite in cloud storage so i would check the guidelines. SLT should be asking you what is required to achieve their vision for ICT in the school with the ICT co-ord you HAVE to be involved. sad thing is if something fails which is aging and needs to be replaced and hasn't its your fault according to them. ICT in some schools is the case of the tail is wagging the dog....

tis a whopper!

on going deployments are using it at present

attempting to do this without MDT as our MDT setup doesnt support 8.1. awaiting DISM to finish capturing a image to USB..... so booted winpe from the UEFI shell and ran DISM. if the image creation completes i might attempt to copy it to another one or use the built in 8.1 recovery to point it at the created WIM. i REALLY dont want to brick it

dont leave us hanging what did you get pictures!

the idea of MDT imo is to reduce the number of images (as the main reason why you would have different images is for PC with differing hardware) im pretty much using what MDT class as hybrid images which contain my core software and any interface tweaks and the like are captured in my reference image, we have 6 ICT suites which have different machine types and one image serves all of these, its not Zero touch. what level of automation are you looking for, full zero touch is i think going to require SCCM.

if the printers are added via policy then you can remove then via policy as well, GPP preferences should allow you to remove unwanted items. if you need to script something to run to give you a clean slate i have used rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry with success in the past.

leasing the equipment is fine but id always consider what happens after the lease period ends. i would look at some recon kit with warranty for the servers, and desktop unit can be had for £250.00 a unit and are going to be a world of difference compared to what you are using. perhaps try and put together a plan for what you want to try and replace over the next 1-2 years and sit down with the school and get some kind of gradual replacement plan in for key area's IE servers 1st and work you way downwards.

im a fan of MDT, having moved over from ghost, working towards getting it working with as little user input as possible & using WDS to PXE boot the clients. worth the effort imo

exclusive access locks out admins from actually looking at the folder iirc its a pita. id check the permissions against the MS document for folder redirection

folder redirection is VERY sensitive to how the permissions are set

permissions on the users folder for the redirection id say.

the printmanagement.msc lets you export out all your printer Q and setting information which is nice

HP sell their kit without the disks added and things like that so the price looks appealing until you start adding the bits you actually need to make it useful..