mhundley

A colleague of mine has written a brief explanation and a workaround for this issue if you are behind a proxy you have no control over. http://blog.primaryschooltech.co.uk/2013/11/yellow-triangle-no-internet.html Please excuse the link as I am replying from my phone.

Hi guys, I am looking for a bit of local advice, I am coming down to the Wells carnival on Friday and due to work restrictions I am not going to be arriving there until between 6 and 7, I have looked at the council website and most of the car parks appear to be within the boundaries of the carnival route which means a lot of the roads will be closed. Does anyone who lives nearby have any advice on where to park? Obviously with the carnival starting at 7 I will be pushing it so will be aiming for the end of the route if that makes any odds. If it is anything like the Weston one then I am sure on street parking will be a delightful experience :-) Thanks in advance Marc

I am making an assumption here but I believe you may be deploying using MDT. If you are using MDT 2012 Update 1 it includes a section in the task sequence called Install Windows Recovery mode (WinRE) or words to that effect, this is the bit which installs the startup mode on your clients. We found this hapening in many schools, every time it was on Netbooks or laptops which were not being shut down properly, because Windows is detecting the dirty shutdown it sets the repair mode to be the default which in turn attempts to restore to a recovery point, the machine password stored here is not current, or even the previous one for the machine, either of which will work on a domain. Since removing this entry from our task sequences we have seen a much smaller number of reports of this, presumably it is happening on machines we have not rebuilt with the new task sequence.

Unfortunately I cannot ask RM as the school do not have a support contract.

Hi all, I have inherited a school with a CC4 curric domain and a vanilla admin domain, the admin is running on a 2003 R2 network. I have been asked to add SIMS to a couple of machines on the curric side. I have created a mapping in the CC4 console and assigned it to the relevant machine container but I cannot see where to add credentials to make the mapping actually work. Do I need to set up a trust relationship between the domains or would I be better adding a GPO to run a batch script and make the mapping that way? It has been years since I have had to play with CCx stuff and I am more than a little rusty, also the school are looking to remove the system in the near future to move to a joint vanilla domain and as such have not renewed the support contract. I have had a look around on the forums here but don't seem to be able to find anything which addresses this issue. Thanks in advance Marc

Hi guys, I am currently playing around with the Wizard screens used during a litetouch deployment, one of the minor annoyances we have had is that using MDT 2010/12 if you pick a task sequence you then have to click next to get to the computer naming screen. I have been able to combine both of these sections into one wizard pane and have written a brief bit of documentation on it here. The challenge I am currently working on is to also provide a checkbox to allow SIMS to be installed as part of the build process, we currently have a batch file which I was going to import as an application and have in the task sequence with some filtering based on the task sequence variable. Although I could achieve this by using the applications pane of the wizard I was hoping to be able to add it to the bottom of the single pane I have created, doing this would allow most machines to be built without SIMS but for the few that need it a quick tick and we are done. I have found a few resources on the net which appear to provide a popup during the task sequence but as I have already said I want a tick and walk away option if possible. For a bit of background we are not using the database as we are working in Primary schools and the database does not really offer any benefits over the way we work now, prestaging is not an option as the schools buy kit as and when and we set it up as needed. I have been able to put a checkbox into the wizard pane but am stuck as to how we actually transfer the checked/unchecked value into the variables.dat file so that it becomes usable across reboots. I know we need to have some form of .vbs file to make the change but my efforts so far have been unsucessful. I have created the variable in the Customsettings.ini file found under the MDT share rules so the variable is definately there to be used, I have confirmed this by pausing the TS during deployment and can see the empty marker for the variable. Thanks for any help you can offer References Popup during TS Setting Variable

Although you dont say what method you are using to deploy your machines the following posts may help you Thoughts of a Primary School Tech: Dell Optiplex 390 fails to apply GPO settings This post above will allow you to create a WMI filter which can be used within an MDT task sequence to either apply or not depending on whether the filter is met I have outlined how to do this here. You will however need to adjust the task sequence step from an application installation to a command line to adjust the registry entry.

This might not be quite what you are after but you could take this opportunity to introduce DFS, using this you could configure replication to move your data, the links to your files would then be in the format of \\domain\DFSRoot\Share rather than \\servername\share. In the future if you wanted to move the data to another location, you could add a new location in as a target for replication and once you are sure the replication has taken place you could update the dfs share pointer to the new location. When users machines look for the data they will automatically be pointed to the new target.

I'm with you on that one, offline files in XP is pretty bad, however it is old tech now. Would love to get all staff running 7 but until the rest of the hardware in school is up to the job I cant see them being too happy at having to use 7 on their kit and teach the kids to use XP, also I dont fancy the joy of having two different profile types to play with :-)

The only updates are the standard MS ones pushed through WSUS or the required ones from Adobe in order to allow youtube to work, the odd thing is that it is happening intermittently for a couple of users, there doesn't seem to be any pattern to either the computer/user/section of school. Throughout this the DFS mapped drives remain consistent, it appears to be the offline files cache which is the issue but I have no idea why.

Yes, it does seem to but I am more concerned with the underlying problem, this has only recently started happening and the domain has been in place for over 2 years without an issue. I have tried putting in place a vbscript to be run at logon which has a counter then effectively presses F5 for the user, however if they are in an application this will not have the desired affect.

Hi, I have had a search but cant seem to find anything which seems to tie in with the issue I am having. At one of the schools I support we are using redirected desktops for Staff and students, for staff users the desktop icons are administratively assigned offline files so that the staff can use their laptops at home. Intermittently when staff log on their desktop icons will disappear when the offline files sync runs through. However logging off and back on again will often fix this. The Desktop locations are provided using DFS shares and staff have appropriate permissions to read the locations but not to write back to them (We dont want half a ton of other peoples stuff on everyones desktop) The client machines are running XP SP3 and the server is 2008R2, all are patched up to date as of last week. Any guesses will be greatfully appreciated. Obviously this is not a showstopper but it is getting annoying for the staff not knowing whether they will have their desktop or not. Marc

We have had a similar issue ourselves (albeit 1054 not 1053) when attempting to deploy software using GPO to machines running Realtek cards, it appears to be due to the net card changing modes during startup, this can leave a machine with no link to the server at exactly the point it needs one to authenticate with the domain or check GPO info. I have put a post up on my blog covering what we did to fix the issue along with a couple of reference pages which seem to back up the 'fix' which I have put in place. Thoughts of a Primary School Tech: Dell Optiplex 390 fails to apply GPO settings Although this is a different EventID to the problem you are having, when I was researching mine I did see that the two appeared to occur together every now and again. As always with advice on Edugeek, your milage may vary and I recommend you try it on a test machine first before potentially ruining your entire network

1TB seems a massive amount of space, have you looked at using MDT? With this you can have a single image for each OS you require and make any changes using a task sequence. What operating systems are you deploying? How many different types of hardware? Are you deploying software within the image? If you want to deploy either Windows 7 or XP it is fairly easy to set up basic task sequences to perform the installation and then let group policy take over for the software deployment. If you are using the same software in most of your images you can import it into MDT and set any silent install switches as required, these applications can then be installed during the installation of the OS. Similarly with hardware, if you have large amounts of the same model then you only need to import the drivers once and the installation will pick the correct ones and inject as build time. If you want more information there are plenty of people on here who have got MDT running nicely who will be more than happy to advise you. If you can give some more info on the background of what kind of setup you have then you could have a test system up and running in a short amount of time. I know this doesn't answer your original question on hardware but in the schools we support we run MDT on the server in school which has to do everything (DHCP,DNS,AD,File & Print server etc) and even when imaging up to 40 machines at a time there is no noticable effect on the servers. Generally all servers we have put in in the last year will have been Dell T610's with between 8-12Gb ram and teamed Intel gig networking.

Hi, It depends on how your system is set up, assuming these computers are on the domain and you are using Group Policy then you may be be in luck, if you have access to Client Side Preferences then you can tell it to remove all printers. To do this navigate to the users preferences section and select new printer, when you get the dialogue box change the create option to delete and further down tick the checkbox for delete all printers. There is loads of info on setting up printers with GPO Preferences at this site Grouppolicy.biz If you are set on/stuck with using logon scripts then that can also be done, I have chopped a few bits out of a vbs logon script we used to use before preferences, I think this will be complete but have not tested it. On error resume next Dim objNetwork, oP, lgCnt Set objNetwork = CreateObject("Wscript.Network") Set oP=objNetwork.EnumPrinterConnections lgCnt=oP.Count Do While lgCnt>0 objNetwork.RemovePrinterConnection oP.Item(lgCnt-1),True,True lgCnt=lgCnt-2 Loop As i have said this is chopped from another script which I have successfully used in several schools, however I have lost the original source for the script so cannot publish the whole thing out of respect for the original author. My understanding of how the script works is that it looks for all network printer connections and instead of needing to know the name it simply gives it a value, the loop simply removes the printer found at an decreasing value working from the last to first printer. Give that a try and if you need any more help/my script is missing a bit (entirely likely as I am away from the proper code) please feel free to reply and we will see what we can do for you.