atamakosi

i'm looking into upgrading our systems to 2013 and found this Doesn't seem too painful so I've created a gpo for the office scrub script and I've just fired up my test machine to see what happens...

I did find some references to webDAV when researching this issue. IIS is running on this server for our lovely symantec management, but that is it as far as I know. I disabled IIS and web services on the server and it caused OneNote to freeze when unpacking. So it definitely has some effect there. It is odd that it defaults to this protocol whenever trying to unpack on a network share and I haven't found a way to disable/edit this preference.

We're having an issue when trying to open a OneNote package from a shared folder. When the wizard starts for unpacking the file, we select any option other than a local folder we encounter an error. "OneNote cannot create a new notebook at: http://server/resource$/folder/subfolder/" gives possible reasons as network location unavailable (it is), do not have permission to modify location (I do), path or network name contains invalid characters (don't believe so as some OneNote packages open from this location and some don't), combined path and notebook name exceed path lenght (not even close). The package contains a default layout for our staff appraisals for HOFs, HODs, etc. to fill in. So they are stored in folders with specific permissions for the appraisee and appraiser to have access and no one else. Permissions should read like so: appraiser (full) appraisee (full) administarors (full) system (full) Not sure where the issue is so any help is appreciated. OneNote seems to be a bit funny with shared packages far as I've seen. I posted here not so long ago about users losing all their OneNote data that was supposed to be saved to these same folders after their laptop is re-imaged. cheers.

Occasionally it happens that a teacher's laptop needs to be reimaged. Afterwards, they have a heck of a time trying to open the OneNote notebooks from the network shared folder. Is there an easy way to tell OneNote here is where X notebook sections are, open as a notebook and retain the location? I insist that all their data is still on the network folder as that is where they are working from in OneNote but however the data is stored, it will only open a section at a time. OneNote doesn't recognize it as a Notebook and it doesn't keep the Notebook location saved in their OneNote settings/profile.

I vaguely recall having an issue with mandatory profiles. I was able to get a 'clean' version from another thread (http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/88926-mandatory-profile-students-can-anyone-please-share-working-profile-me.html#post780532) and that solved the issue i was having. maybe give that a shot if you don't want roaming profiles for your student.

surname, first initial. if already taken add the next number in sequence. john smith: smithj becomes smithj2 i've set our student management system to do this for me so that when it receives the enrolment data it creates an account for the student. it ensures there are no duplicates. its not lazy, its being efficient!

here's my 2 cents: after a lot of trial and error, I've remapped the user documents to a different drive letter ('X') as the HP machines we use have a media card reader that was automatically linked to the old profile drive letter ('H'). I then use folder redirection to %HOMESHARE%%HOMEPATH% for documents. only issue i've experienced since setup is that some user accounts, when initially created, don't automatically generate a corresponding user documents folder. profile path for my students is \\domain\students$\year\%username%, should just need read, list folder contents, and read & execute permissions for domain users on the levels above username.

So if I configure the SMTP messaging in Site Admin > Plugins > Message outputs > Email, would all emails be sent to their recipients email address ([email protected])? Since it only accepts one set of credentials, have you then set up a dummy ([email protected]) account to send emails from? If this is the case then this serves only as a notification system and doesn't allow for message conversations between student/teachers?

I've recently switched servers and installed a newer version of Moodle (2.2). We have student email accounts hosted on Google Apps with our domain as the subfix. Previously, I could've sworn that all messages within Moodle were sent to these addresses. Now it appears not to be the case. Moodle now only sends messages within Moodle. I notice that the output for SMTP can be configured but with only one account. 1. Am I imagining things? 2. If it is possible to send emails from teachers to students (and vice versa) using the messaging system and have them arrive to [email protected], how can I configure that? cheers

all the network drives are mapped using gpo and haven't been changed in years.

having something of a similar situation. Teachers can only receive a black screen with white cursor at login. Running Win 7 Ent x64. This recently started occurring for just one teacher but has spread to 4 now. I've recreated the profile for the first teacher but that made no difference. No new software has been installed but there was a string of updates pushed out by our new WSUS server. Student accounts are fine so i'm thinking it does have something to do with the teachers profile.

I'm trying to get my budget together for next year and would like to put some shiny, new thin clients as an option since I've setup the infrastructure already for them. (currently running 30+ old reconfigured machines) I'm curious what everyone uses for their hardware? I've seen some HP, Wyse, Axel thin clients online but not sure how they perform in an education environment. I like the look of Axel's tiny clients but can't get anyone to get back to me about NZ distributors/pricing. I've also considered using Raspberry pi's but have zero experience with them and what it would take to make them boot off pxe. so...thoughts anyone?

i spent some time trying to configure a whitelist for students for https but it doesn't do it very cleanly. It seems to load only part of the approved https sites, ignoring things like the CSS and graphics. basically just a bunch of text in div formats. ugh. so looks like isa is still not smart enough to handle https in anything but allowed or blocked format. Are there any other suggestions to try? cheers

didn't consider this approach. will this work with isa 2006? it seems to be fairly 'blind' when it comes to https traffic.

My school runs an ISA server for our gateway with a huge list of sites to filter that I've compiled and a second layer of filtering through a MoE approved content filter (tunnel our web traffic from our ISP to them). BUT because we allow https for student's to check email, etc. they are able to use the secure option for accessing sites like facebook, twitter, blah blah blah. It's gotten so bad that I'm actually willing to part from my pittance of a budget to take care of this issue. I'd rather find a free solution if I can though. So the question is, what do you use and how effective is it at selectively blocking the non-approved content from the internet? for those that suggest just blocking the port for https, I've incorporated google apps accounts into our school learning environment and students receive updates regarding their online Moodle classes this way and communicate directly with teachers. So blocking that isn't in the cards. I've seen smoothwall advertised here and checked out their site. However, I've not got all the details on that (like cost, difference between the Express and Corporate, and does it need its own box or VM?) anyone have experience with that product in terms of our issues? cheers guys/gals

also this might help with your question about changing the splash screen during boot. You can install an app called plymouth manager that should allow you to customize the theme for splash using a .png file under 500kb for your logo or you can change it to text if you like. there are even some default themes that you might like (such as ones that emulate win7 or osX lol). to get plymouth try from terminal using: sudo apt-get install plymouth-manager or wget https://launchpad.net/plymouth-manager/trunk/stable/+download/plymouth-manager_1.5.0-1_all.deb sudo dpkg -i plymouth-manager_1.5.0-1_all.deb might be missing some dependencies if you are like me so had to run this afterwards: sudo apt-get -f install that will fetch missing dependencies. You can then run plymouth from the 'start' menu for a gui or you can use it in terminal if you are brave. also i can't seem to replicate the issue where it drops the connection to the terminal server after going to standby on the machine i'm testing today. so maybe it was a first week kind of deal and sorted itself?

sounds like you've got the thin client going then. congrats! you just need to setup the xfreerdp session properly. I would recommend testing the settings in RDP_OPTIONS. first thing i would do is remove it completely and see what the results are on the thin client machine. you can specify the windows server in a separate line if you like (RDP_SERVER = IP_OR_FQDN_OF_SERVER) one simple thing is not to forget the quotes around the RDP_OPTIONS line, otherwise you'll get a syntax error but it won't tell you. also in comparison to my original setup where i had rdesktop use screen 2, the new version or xfreerdp did not like that screen at all. using screen 7 or 8 worked for me. (i'm assuming some screens might be reserved in this version but haven't seen the documentation to say yay or nay.) but yes, sounds like it is only a matter of figuring the lts.conf file settings for freerdp for your setup. (did you say if you were running virtual ubuntu ltsp server?) the basic settings you need for xfreerdp are --no-nla and --ignore-certificates to at least get you to the rdp session. -gdi is a graphics setting and -f is full screen. you can find the entire list of options for lts.conf here but it looks a little outdated as it references rdesktop. i'm sure i've got more tips but that is all i can think of right now.

the server that you want students to log in to. in my case ubuntu is just used to load the remote desktop client to connect to our Windows terminal server. so they are actually logging in to windows not ubuntu.

sorry if my instructions weren't all too clear. tried to get them all written out before my mind totally shut off after looking at the terminal for days. the ol' "white cursor on black background" bug. That is the most common issue i've dealt with using ltsp and it has to do with lts.conf settings i believe. To check a few things though we should ctrl + alt + f8 into xterm so we can see if you have a valid IP and can ping the terminal server. (if not familiar with linux, ifconfig will pull up your ip info) So are you using a virtual machine as well? and did you change the IP to your terminal server? (you should be able to use FQDN as well if you like) you could remove splash and see more details on boot if you modify the default file here /var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/i386/pxelinux.cfg/default just delete quiet and splash, i believe. these will come back when you update image so don't worry about having to go back later to put them in. the reason we added "export HOME=${HOME:-/root}" to the xinitrc file was, according to the nice people at LTSP, without a default HOME location the client could cause the issue we are seeing. This should be added in newer versions so this will be unnecessary in the future.

in the previous version of ltsp with rdesktop as the rdp client it would go in to standby. i'm discovering with the new ltsp using xfreerdp that the client machine appears to shut the connection completely after some time without any activity. i've only had this new setup running for less than a week so haven't got any hard numbers yet. I think it would be best to close it completely so it doesn't keep the performance high on the TS and frees up a CAL for another user. but it seems upon wake it doesn't re-establish the connection as previous version did. the machine has to be rebooted to do this. there might be a fix but haven't gotten to it yet. thin clients on the ts are named in order of connection such as #ltsp0001 , #ltsp0002, yada yada. i haven't bother naming them. using the lts.conf though i can specify different options using MAC addresses for different machines. for example, i might throw a few thin clients in to our staff break room and could add an xterm screen to those if i wanted quick access while having my lunch. (cause when do we ever get breaks, right?)

using the x64 ubuntu server edition 12.04 now. I'll take a look in to broker now that i'm aware of it. Are you wanting to use ctrl alt del to pull up lock, switch user, task manager, change password? once the user is logged in then they have those options using ctrl alt del (based on policy of course). i thought you were just curious about if it would reboot the client haha. my students only have access to log off when hitting ctrl alt del so that is the only option they see. SSO - single sign on that would allow a student/user to login to their school account and then it would automatically log them in to their google apps accounts and moodle account. the end user would only see one login screen (windows 7 login) and would be able to access all their data (emails, google drive, google docs, moodle assignments, etc.) some vendors have offered this to us but its a monthly or annual fee based on number of users. i thought, we could do this for nothing. I'm working on shibboleth identity provider with apache tomcat 7 to do this on our ubuntu machine. still unforeseen if it will work or not lol.

on boot the ubuntu server handles the request for the pxelinux.0 file and then loads the image to the client. the image is loaded into memory on the thin client and the ubuntu server doesn't have much else to do with it at that point. (i've pulled all the HDD's from my thin clients just to reduce electricity usage, noise, and heat.) if you choose to try and use the LDM (display manager, something like a linux login screen that can load a *nix desktop. not sure which one, maybe Gnome) then the ubuntu server will be used to authenticate the user but thats about it. Ctrl alt del is disabled when you are on the RDP screen. if you switch to xterm screen, ctrl alt del will reboot. (one reason to just have freerdp designated in your lts.conf file) don't currently use rds broker just basic terminal sessions manager on server 2k8 r2. as an aside, i'm currently working on installing SSO to the ubuntu server as well to get more function out of it.

well, despite my issues I think it was fairly easy and straightforward to setup LTSP. Currently, I've got about 30 thin client machines around school, i'll be adding more to this number as i finish diags on some other machines. they are a mix of 7 year old Dell's and 5 year old Asus units. All can boot in about 15 seconds to a login screen. It looks exactly like if they were in front of the terminal servers display itself. No close connection bar at top, on logout it goes straight back to the login screen, etc. basically nothing for a student to cause any problems with (as long as you have the right GPO for students to use TS). there is a small image downloaded to the client on boot which opens xfreerdp in screen 7, in my lts.conf you can see this. I have since removed ldm and xterm. those i used to troubleshoot a thin client connection and its running fine now so i just killed them out. (xterm allowed me to ping the servers and check IP and ldm gave me a desktop to work with if i wanted. you can swap between screens on a thin client by holding ctrl + alt + function key number correlating to the screen number.)

Fairly well, i think. I had some bumps but i've kept my notes here. I've gotten everything I've wanted from a thin client booting to our terminal services. No ability for students to close the connection on logout, no more than a single credentials check, fast boot over network. Fairly happy but I'll be wary of doing a system update next time. had to wipe my ubuntu server cause of a corrupt dhcp upgrade. in the end i learned i could have gotten on without it anyway haha. live and learn.

Has anyone used the Google Apps migration tool for exchange? if so how did you find the process and educating your staff on how to access the new email system? (also curious if Outlook can be configured to access the Google Apps email account without much pain and fuss?) Our school recently lost our relay so most outgoing emails are getting bounced. I'm 5 minutes away from decommissioning the exchange server and migrating to google apps for our staff. I'm only hesitant because i'm worried how well the transition would take. looking from a user's pov, i wouldn't want much disruption on their end. if possible, migrate all the data and then reconfigure their outlook accounts automatically. cheers for thoughts/opinions/experiences.