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.

Just a thought but have the new machines got Gig network cards by any chance? We have had a similar issue with a Vanilla network and Dell Optiplex 390's. I know RM do things differently and cant remember whether the station security is their renamed text for applying group policies. I have set a reg key which disables DHCP Media sensing, you could give this a go on a test machine and see what happens. I have posted an entry about this on my blog which can be found here. Hope this helps or at least gives you something useful to try

Vanit, I had a quick look on google and it returned this post from the scripting guys at MS. The PowerShell Guy : Hey PowerShell Guy !,How Can I Parse a Tab-Delimited File and Then Save That as a Comma-Separated Values File? I had a look but the command it leaves you with is not a pretty one, without knowing the extent of your text file I would still look to move either to an xml or csv type of file, MS have written both xml and csv import functions which should make it easier to access your data, using csv is documented here I can understand that a simple text file is easier to read when you are using notepad or other text editor but if you are looking to do more complex things with the data then using an accepted file format may make things easier in the long run. Although as with all of these things learning a new way of doing things will present more challenges so your mileage may vary. :-) If you can give us a little more info on exactly what you are looking to do the wider community on here may be able to offer more specific advice, they are generally really good at approaching things in a logical way and someone may already have the bare bones of what you need to give you a head start.

Looking at your post, you are not seperating the server details from the user info, you would probably need to use a csv format and read the file into an array to process after. Are you set on using text files? Powershell has pretty easy xml handling, plus you have the advantage that you will be using a standard file type which you could access in other scripts with minimal recoding. For a file called template.xml with the following layout Firstname1 Surname1 You could use some code like the following -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Code Starts -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ #Hard coded file path (resolves to c:\users\Loggedonuser........) $filepath="$home\Powershell Testing\template.xml" #Load xml File $xml = New-Object XML #Create holder called $xml as an xml object $xml.Load($filepath) #Tell PS to load the contents of $filepath into $xml #Create new entry $oldperson=@($xml.employee.person)[0] #Load contents of person array position 0 into variable $oldperson $newperson=$oldperson.Clone() #This creates an empty version of the person description stored at $oldperson $newperson.firstname="Firstname2" #Set your new info $newperson.lastname="Surname2" #Set your new info #Append values to file $xml.employee.AppendChild($newperson) #adds values of $Newperson to end of array #Save back to file $xml.employee.version="2.0" #Change value in xml header to new number (Could be automated) $xml.Save("$home\Powershell Testing\updated_template.xml") #Save values stored in $xml to the file called updated_template.xml Get-Content "$home\Powershell Testing\updated_template.xml" #Read the contents of the file updates_template.xml #List Data $xml.employee.person #Echo the values of $xml.employee.person to screen -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Code Ends -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Running the above code will leave you with two files, the original template.xml and the created updated_template.xml file. Firstname1 Surname1 Firstname2 Surname2 If you wanted to read the contents then you could use something similar to $personfirstname=$xml.employee.person.firstname Apologies if I am a little wrong but I am sat on a mac with no windows box nearby, however this should put you on roughly the right lines. If you want when I get to work tomorrow I will look for the reference I used when I was trying to get this working.

Hi, we have encountered a similar issue and one of my coleagues has posted information on this here. Musings of a Primary School Tech: Removing Items from Navigation Pane. If you require any further info please feel free to ask and I will point him in the direction of this thread. Good Luck

Feel free to PM me if you want more info, as I said above it is just a couple of quick and dirty pages but it seems to work quite nicely. However having looked at Concerto, I will be looking at installing it myself to see what it can do. If you are wanting to only set one screen up, you can set Xibo up with both a Wamp server and the display client on the same machine.

I have set up a basic display whch I have yet to put into action, however testing has proven the concept. I have an install of Xibo running in a Hyper-V client, this install uses WAMP with an additional database for notices. To access this additional database I use some simple php code and mysql queries which allow the system to use today's date and display any current/upcoming events to parents or visitors. The system is set to use BBC's Newsround rss feed for child friendly news and using a JQuery slideshow webpage which can be loaded into a region in Xibo, the slideshow looks to a set location which you specify in the code and is generated each time the page is reloaded, this means that each time your Xibo region/slide refreshes the slideshow is updated. For the teachers to manage things easily I have installed Gallery3 which is a php based gallery software, you can create a named gallery and tell staff to put images they want displayed into this gallery, in addition for the events I have written a php page which allows staff to add events to the database, the events are added as unconfirmed by default, this will not show up in the display, a simple link is added for the teacher to confirm the event. If confirmed the event will appear next time the events page is refreshed. Its been a long day and I haven't explained this very well, if you want more info or advice please let me know and I will see if I can be of any help.

Do you need to use an XP Wim? We use MDT to deploy XP as a replacement for RIS, the process is roughly the same, you PXE boot to get to the WinPE, select a task and then insert a computer name, the process is then automated just like a RIS build used to be. The way we have it configured at the moment the build places the computer into the Computers container in AD, we could get it to build into any OU we want but this could interfere with the task sequence. When the build has completed the computer can be moved into the correct OU and any software will deploy as normal via GPO. Using this method the task sequence will insert the relevant drivers at build time, we can also install important pre-requisites and .exe software such as .net at build time. Some hardware requires specific drivers for the chipset/sata, using the advanced section in MDT you can create a selection profile which can be used in a custom task sequence to force only the drivers you know work onto the hardware, this is much easier than editing the .sif files you had in RIS. I have written a Powershell script to set up our environment, this takes pre-configured task sequence files and deploymentshare rules which we know work to provide a uniform configuration. If there is any interest I will make this available once I have stripped out any sensitive info.

Jamin100, thanks for the advice, I have given it a go today and following a test deployment it doesnt appear to break anything, have rolled out to staff machines so hopefully this will be the end of it. It just annoys me that companies providing software/hardware for education fail to look beyond the great concept (which I do believe visualisers are) and pick the first/cheapest thing they can find. The software actually installs a systray icon which has a popup saying "Right Click On Me" after all the time ive spent training people not to follow instructions like that if they didnt instigate it beggars belief from an educational supplier. [/rant] Right onto something more entertaining, thanks again.

You could add a command into your task sequence to lock the workstation, we do this to allow app installs and domain join things to occur. Insert a commandline into the task sequence using the command "rundll32 user32.dll,LockWorkStation" This will lock the machine, however you will have to put additional commands in the task sequence if the machine reboots.

Hi Guys and Girls, I have been handed a TTS Easi-View visualiser installation CD and asked to put the software on every staff laptop. No problem I thought, i'll copy the installation MSi to the serve and off we go. But no, in their wisdom TTS have chosen to sell a cheap webcam on a stick and bundle it with software which only comes as an exe and which demands that the camera is connected at time of installation. Unfortunately the Aver+ software which is already installed on the laptops will not see the camera and the school are unlikely to buy more of these as the cheapest seems to come in at around two and a half times the price. I was wondering if anyone had managed to package this up as an MSI, and if they did could give me a few hints on how to actually do it. I would like to actually do it myself so I have the experience in case anything else of this type comes my way. I did notice there was a file extracted to %temp% which seems to list the deviceid of the usb camera, I was wondering if this could be edited to look for a device which exists in all of the laptops. I am fairly experienced in making and editing MSI's and due to the fact that the installation runs a dpinst to add some drivers I am not keen to just do a discover image as I have had major issues with discovers and driver packages before. Similarly I am not keen to do an AutoIT or startup script unless absolutely necessary as this will be the start of a slippery slope whereby apps are installed via one of many methods and no-one really knows how or why a particular type was chosen. Unfortunately appdeploy.com does not list the software so I could not get a start from there. Thanks in advance Marc Edit: Domain is 2K8R2 in 2003 functional mode and clients are XPSP3