Jollity

Another not-an-answer-but-have-thought-of-this-brilliant-workaround post. Would it not be easier to collect the coursework as Word documents, merge in Word 2010 and then export the result to PDF?

This is an interesting idea. Here is a Microsoft article discussing the issue. They confirm what you say, that profiles of guests should be deleted, but also say: I would be nervous that marking our regular users as guests has other consequences. For a start, the MS article suggests to me that profiles of users in the Domain Guests group do not get uploaded back to the server to roam. Do you know if this is the case, or do you only use your trick with mandatory profiles?

Am I right that you mean local copies of mandatory profiles are only deleted if they are super mandatory? Local copies of non-mandatory profiles are surely supposed to be deleted, and usually seem to be for us. That looks like a very handy tool.

Local copies of roaming profiles are supposed to be removed on logoff if you have the "Delete cached copies of roaming profiles" group policy set, however this does not always happen - this has always been a problem, with XP and probably earlier too, though I think it did get a bit better with Vista. I have noticed the problem get worse with our 64-bit machines. I believe that the root cause is programs keeping files open in the profile after the user has logged off - the prevents the profile from being deleted. If this is the case, a log off script to delete the profile will not help, because the delete script will run into the same locked files. I would look into a startup script, because a restart ought to have unlocked the files. I would be cautious about just deleting the files from the "users" folder, because, since Vista, if Windows still has the deleted profile in its list of profiles, the user with that profile will get an error and a temporary profile next time they log on. You can avoid this by deleting the profile from the list in system properties -> advanced. I am not sure what the equivalent way to script this would be: possibly you just need to delete the right registry key in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList" as well as the files. If the profile that is hanging around in the users folder, is not in the list of profiles, then it is apparently safe just to delete the files in users.

Another Wikipedia resource I think worth highlighting is the Simple English Wikipedia - it has the aim of only using simple vocabulary and grammar in its articles.

Point taken: accidents do happen. I will leave it enabled, but try and get it properly configured. I got Putty set up and had a look at the CLI of one of our switches. It seems odd that terminal access still relies on a serial port, but I suppose if the system works there is too much inertia for a change. This sounds like an excellent plan. Presumably the idea of setting edge ports is then the switch will not send STP packets to them? I did not get on to sorting out the spanning tree settings this week. When I started looking at the switch configurations I noticed another problem: the QoS we are supposed to have for the VoIP phone system has never actually been configured. I do not see how this could directly cause the weirdness described above, but it might make the phones system rather less liable to fall over when there is network trouble. I definitely need to spend some quality time with our switches. It certainly made my head spin. Though even if it were not so strange, I would need several readings to make sense of my paragraph of alphabet soup. All 3Com. B and D are the somewhat elderly Superstack 3 Switch 4200 model. A, C, E are newer Baseline switches.

No there is no root bridge set. The spanning tree settings were left on their defaults. I will have a look tomorrow to see what they are each set to. Though is there any reason to have spanning tree enabled at all if the topology of your switch connections is already a tree? I am aware the daisy chain is less than ideal. We have plans to get some more fibre laid so that we can get closer to a star, but these are waiting for the trenches to be dug. I have never had a look at the switch boot up using CLI. Would certainly be interesting to do so.

Any Windows computer with Chrome should support the Chrome policies. My references to XP having to support the policy were (unnecessarily confusingly) about ADMX files for configuring Windows settings. For example, configuring the settings for Bitlocker obviously ain't gunna do much on XP.

Fair enough. I was thinking you meant to use different android phones for the children using the setup in practice.

Networks are silly. Problem: Link between two switches not working Solution: Restart a switch unconnected to either of the problematic switches The problem was apparently a one off, but I'd be interested if anyone has any idea what was happening. We have switches A to E connected like this by Gigabit ethernet (as well as some other switches branching off): A-B-C-D-E Links are copper, except for a fibre link from C to D. With everything plugged in, no device that was connected to B, C, D or E could talk to any device connected to A, or vice versa. However if I unplugged cable B-C or cable C-D, then suddenly the link A-B works again. Unplugging D-E, did not let A-B work, so the problem was narrowed down to switch D. After I restarted switch D, the link A-B worked fine again. The switches were probably in a weird state from some network trouble earlier in the day: a computer had been continually spamming DHCP requests which caused the whole network to grind to a halt. However that had been stopped hours before - the A-B link problem appeared after the end of the school day when network traffic should have been reaching a minimum. Has anyone seen anything like this before? Does anyone have any idea how it could happen? My best guess is something to do with Spanning Tree Protocol (which we have switched on, though I do not think there is any need for it to be on).

If like-Dropbox is what you need, why not the real thing? Why not just use a different Dropbox account?

Using a single roaming profile for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 machines is working fairly well for us too. This is fortunate, as I only saw the warning about it being unsupported when I was half-way through implementing it. Microsoft do seem to have done a fair amount work to make it possible for profiles to be compatible with both. There have been a few hiccups. I think most of them will be resolved when we rebuild our default profile in the Christmas Holidays - the original of the current one only ever logged on to a 32-bit machine. For a start, this means that our mandatory profiles are very slow to log on to 64-bit machines, presumably because they need to do some initialisation for the first login to a 64-bit machine on every log in.

/MAXAGE probably would be better than using /m. For a start it avoids the risk of problems with something else relying on the archive attribute. However the YYYYMMDD date the script calculates is the current date, whereas you would want to give MAXAGE the date of the last backup. Perhaps saving the date in a file each time the script is run would work? Another potential bug might be to rely on only the date, rather than date and time of the last backup. Example: 14/11/11 10:00 - save file X 14/11/11 11:00 - run the robocopy script - file X will be saved in the 20111114 folder 16/11/11 11:00 - run the robocopy script again with /MAXAGE 20111114. File X is saved in the 20111116 folder, even though it hasn't changed since we last ran the script. Maybe that is not a problem, but it does mean the backups will not be strictly incremental. Oddly I cannot see an option for robocopy to exclude files older than a date and time.

Sounds good. If the version of Picasa you are using is entirely web-based, what is it on your phone that actually does the uploading?

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I thought it would be worth adding that the Office 2010 type of shortcut is a Windows Installer advertised shortcut. These are usually created by MSI installs (though MSIs can create the ordinary type of shortcut). They run checks on the application files before actually launching it, which causes a windows installer progress bar to appear when you first run the software on a user's account. This can be useful, though on some occasions (particularly with mandatory profiles) is a menace. I have observed that sometimes Windows does some magic to make a shortcut directing to "program files" run a program in "program files (x86)" (but not vice versa). Not sure if this always works.

I think dhicks might be on to something, but until he gets his service off the ground... If the problem at the moment was just about sharing your tech dropbox accounts with the phones, you could run a separate instance of dropbox in a different Windows account on the server. However that would not work very well because you only want to sync one way - you don't want everyone's photos ending up on all the phones. You could maybe do something about that with a separate folder for each phone. Do you need to go via the cloud at all? What about just having something to automatically upload from an android phone to a windows folder when possible? Something like this perhaps? I suppose that wouldn't work if you want uploads to continue while the phone is off-site.

ADMX files do work for configuring Windows XP, though you have to input the settings on a Server 2008 machine or on Vista or 7 with the Remote Administration Pack. The features you are configuring have to be supported in XP of course. (Source: blogs.technet.com/b/grouppolicy/archive/2008/12/17/questions-on-admx-in-windows-xp-and-windows-2003-environments.aspx (sorry can't do a link, too new )). I thought you needed to install an update, which appeared in WSUS a while ago, but that must have been just for Group Policy Preferences.

Neatly done, jinnantonnixx. I did not know the trick of using tokens, and it might help me with a script bug I need to fix. But haven't you missed out part of what rshortland was asking for? He wanted the copies after the first to be incremental, with only changed files. The only way I can see to do that would be to use the archive attribute, which will not work if anything else is using it - ie if you do a separate incremental backup on those files that relies on the archive bit, then altering it when you do your robocopying will mean the files get missed out of that backup. You need to make sure the archive attribute is unset on all the files after the initial copy, I think the command for that is: attrib -a /S /D Then for the incremental copies after the initial copy, use the /m switch with the robocopy command. robocopy %destfolder% /E /M