gshaw

Setting up mandatory profiles on our 7 test machines is proving to be "fun" as anyone who's experienced so far will testify Although I've seen alternative methods initially I want to stick with the supported way, although even following the Microsoft guide I've changed the method slightly... Set up a VMware Gold image with all our software installed Snapshot the image before doing any customisations (or clone might be safer actually) Use one of the cloned images to capture the Gold image to SCCM, use the other for mandatory profile creation Make all profile changes as required Snapshot machine before starting Sysprep Run Sysprep with Copyprofile XML blah blah Once done, login as a local admin user and use the Copy To button on default profile Copy to C: drive (as copying to the network seems to be a right PITA when the source machine isn't on the domain) Take profile from C: of reference machine, place on network share. Check security to ensure it's inherited permissions from the profile share... if not replace security and owner with inherited settings Set profile location in AD and test When done revert the snapshot of the profile creation VM so we can make further customisations and run Sysprep again as and when required There doesn't seem to be much reference online to doing it this way (saw one article using the same snapshot idea above) so I'm at the stage of wondering if it's a clever solution or a stupid one

Backup Exec, just takes a mask of *.vbk in the root folder where our jobs are stored... could do the same with Windows Backup as well. If you use a different job mode there are scripts that can fire off stream-to-tape jobs after the Veeam backup completes (see their support forum)

We do nightly Veeam backups using reverse incremental mode so always have the latest backup as a full. We then stream that to tape once a week on weekends (recycled every 4 weeks) plus one monthly tape kept for a year. Veeam has 30 days of restore points so we can go back a month for quick disk restores before having to restore from archive.

SCCM does software collection audits so you can build reports of what PCs software is installed on, even down to particular versions etc

I'd avoid putting the profiles in the same structure as you'll want to disable offline files on the profile share...

Bit of both I reckon, feels very similar to the VMware vRAM tax backtrack...

Just tweaking our temperature monitoring setup at the moment to have a 2nd monitoring device (after one crashed out the other day) but it got me thinking about where to place the sensors. As it stands I've got... - APC UPS temperature sensor mounted high at the back of the rack - 2 x temperature sensors for the monitoring devices (1 per device) Now I could have them in a couple of places... thoughts on each please... - back of rack (exhaust fan temperature is probably going to be the highest i.e. worst case scenario) - inlet temperature (front of rack i.e. the temperature of the air going into the servers for cooling) - top of the rack \ somewhere in the room (ambient temperature but could be affected by the cold air stream from the aircon) Could mix and match i.e. 1 sensor for inlet one ambient etc (also have the option to buy an additional sensor on each monitoring device although may use that for smoke detection)

Will do, PM me your email and I'll elaborate a bit further

Might be worth trying to merge these threads somehow?

Gah it's so frustrating that MS don't have the sense to think of this Looks like 2012 has a couple of funky new features, a shiny UI but it's pretty much 2007 underneath with the same foibles that date back to SMS 2003 (and probably before that!) Was talking to someone on Novell the other day and they showed me Zenworks... makes SCCM look amateurish in comparison with the granularity you get when deploying software!

Have to agree with the posts from others on here... bad move from Microsoft, which is a real shame as your (very positive) changes to Office 365 pricing will get lost in the whirlwind of bad publicity around this instead The Software4Students style scheme was simple and effective and from personal experience I know it moved quite a few people from pirate to genuine Microsoft software... I suspect others will go back the other way as a result of the price hike...

I'm going to an MS event next week where Office 365 \ Live@Edu is on the agenda... watch my blog as I'll update after I find out about... - migration timescales - ADFS vs LiveID authentication - SkyDrive (apparently can still use it on 365 somehow) - using Office 365 as a hybrid with on-premise Exchange (e.g. use the 365 inbox as an online archive for staff with in-house Exchange)

I wonder if that's down to the system being abused or Microsoft wanting more profits

I'd avoid tbh, used to do that years ago but now I'd want matching new tyres from a known manufacturer... use UK Tyres Online | Cheap Tyres | Winter Tyres & Car Servicing their prices are usually decent

Would be interested to know how you got on with the issues mentioned on the previous page http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/89525-school-remote-access-how-do-you-do-7.html @zag you might want to get those RDP patches installed on your server asap if it's open to the Internet...

Just posting this for reference to save anyone else the aggro We've installed MRBS 1.4.8 and wanted to enable LDAP but whatever we did with the config files didn't work... tried every which way, all the additional fields with no luck. Found errors in the logs along the lines of Warning: array_fill() [function.array-fill]: Number of elements must be positive in /path/to/mrbs/auth_ldap.inc on line 113 A bit of nifty Google searching later shows that there's a bug with the auth_ldap.inc file on the current 1.4.8 build which requires patch 2249 (download from SVN) General discussion of MRBS (Meeting Room Booking System) http://mrbs.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/mrbs/mrbs/?view=log&pathrev=2249 Enjoy!

One thing for SCCM 2012... is it possible to set a software deployment to run before the user logs on (i.e. so it works like GPO package deployment) It's always seemed an oversight that you either have to have the machine on the login screen (doesn't happen here) or the user logged on (and you either have to kill processes before beginning installs or hope the program isn't open if upgrading). Either a pre-login deployment option or a way to lock the workstation to the user while deployment is taking place would be a lot more useful.

Might be wrong but in theory if you're sending keystrokes and \ or displaying confidential data (MIS system etc) over the Internet (via the RDP stream) it seems a bit iffy to me? Just realised our new Palo Alto box has a rather funky remote access system built in so problem solved

They really need to up their game... getting left behind by the likes of Palo Alto and the application-level firewalls at the moment

stock.xchng are pretty good stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site Also Flikr Public?

I'm stuck on exam cover this evening so have spent the time playing with our Win7 test GPOs to get it looking and feeling as I want... it's been a few months since we first started looking at 7 and these Libraries still look as pointless and irritating now as they did back then! So far we've done the hide trick with the additional GPO (very neat) but it's the Save dialogs that bother me... guess I can try the Grimadmin link but not sure how it will work if I make the replacement location for the "Public" Library a read-only folder? The only Shared area we have isn't one I'd want people saving into... any thoughts? Microsoft how hard is it to release a GPO to remove the Public locations from Libraries?!

Interesting, really glad I didn't buy one now as I'm not much keen on Dell generally...

On PCs with Word '97 (original version not a service pack update) - start a new document - type the word "blue" - make it bold & blue - Help > About - hold CTRL+SHIFT and click on the Word icon PINBALL

You make me cry :'(

I guess question is whether the time spent troubleshooting issues that might arise as a result of doing it an unsupported way is worth what you save initially...