dr6figures

I know the feeling. We are rolling out Windows 8 and Office 2013 this August to several of our computer labs. We teach computer courses and the selected textbooks are written for Office 2013 and Windows 8, so my boss said that we are going to it. Win 8 is not that bad when you install a 3rd party start menu app that bypasses Metro. The one thing that I don't like is that the default metro apps (Weather, Sports, Games, etc...) are provisioned per user and not for everyone that logs on to the PC. This means that if person A logs on and updates the Metro apps, and person B logs on, person A has the latest versions of the apps and person B has the older versions until he or she updates them manually. And, if you try to update the Metro apps in the reference image and run Sysprep, then Sysprep fails! I'd just turn them off if we could, but the textbooks have activities for students using these default apps, so we need them. And, each student logs into the PC with a domain account, so it is a ring of setbacks. Plus, Metro apps are updated through the Windows Store and not through Windows Update, so the whole thing is a mess.

Hi everyone, First, thank you in advance for any help that you may be able to provide. I greatly appreciate it and if you need any clarification whatsoever, please don't hesitate to ask. I work at a community college where I have just been told that we are going to be migrating to Windows 8 Enterprise in some of our computer labs in the Computer Science department, effective August 2013. So far, application testing has been going well, but I am having an issue with the start screen with local mandatory profiles. A little background: Our I.T. administration is divided between me, who handles the computer science department, and a larger IT group that services the rest of the campus. Larger I.T. has recently upgraded all of their labs from Windows XP to Windows 7. What that means in this context is that students logging in will, come August, have the potential to log in to Windows 7 in some labs, and then come to my computer science labs and log in to Windows 8. Here’s the problem: Our network engineers have configured most of the domain accounts that students log on to with a mandatory profile path of %systemdrive%\manprofile in Active Directory. (This translates to a ".v2” profile for Win 7 & 8.) This is OK except that when I log on to a Windows 8 machine, the start screen has 3 tiles on it: the IE live app tile, the Desktop tile, and the Store tile, and that is it. We have some other accounts that do not have a hardcoded profile path in AD, and those work fine when I log into them from the domain- I get all live tiles and application tiles exactly as I should. To recap: Most student domain accounts have %systemdrive%\manprofile configured in Active Directory. Logging in with an account like this pulls the profile from c:\manprofile.v2, and I only get the IE live app tile, the Desktop tile, and the Store tile, and that is it. No other icons or tiles are visible. If I log in with a domain account with no hardcoded profile path configured in Active Directory, I have all live tiles and application tiles that I should have. We need to have the Windows 8 start screen available to students in its entirety. Is there anything I can do to get this to work with accounts configured for mandatory profiles? Again, thank you for your time. I do appreciate it. At this point, I don't know if my efforts are futile or not, but my supervisor wants it to work as advertised, so I thought I would put it out there and see if any of the awesome people here had an idea as to what I can do. All the best- Dr. 6

Hi fellow IT Folks, First off, I just want to say that FOG is the best piece of software I have ever had the privilege of using, bar none. I like its flexibility, I like what it can do, and I like what I can do with it. I used to use DRBL back in the day, and once I got the feel for using FOG, FOG became the replacement, and I haven’t looked back since. So I want to give a wholehearted thanks to everyone who works endlessly to keep this project alive. FOG simply is awesome! I have a question that I am hoping someone can help me with. I work in a community college as a computer lab manager. Part of the way I have implemented FOG is to have a master FOG server on a cart with 2 to 3 other FOG servers serving as storage nodes. I then take this cart, plug all FOG computers into a gigabit switch, and then connect all of the clients that I want to image to the switch as well. At the most, there are 16 clients; at the least, there are 10. Taking the scenario where I image 16 computers at a time, I access the FOG web console and configure the storage nodes in the following manner: Master FOG server, 4 max clients assigned to this storage node. Storage Node 1, 4 max clients assigned to this storage node. Storage Node 2, 4 max clients assigned to this storage node. Storage Node 3, 4 max clients assigned to this storage node. This way, the imaging load is evenly distributed across the 4 nodes. (Or so I think.) When I image, I create a group in FOG that I put the hosts in, configure the image and OS associations and do a unicast restore on the group because if I try multicasting, it chokes the switch. Overall it takes about 30 – 45 minutes to push the image out to all 16 clients. The image that I am pushing out is about 40 GB uncompressed. Since I just took this job in August, I did a quick-assemble on the fog carts with what I had at the time – retired Dell Optiplex computers with 2 GB of RAM. I put 300 GB HDDs in all units, and I am only pushing the one image. I would like to better implement FOG in my next round of imaging while still retaining the carts and isolated server setup. Does it sound like I am on the right track? Do I have the storage nodes assigned properly for even load balancing, or is there a better way to assign hosts to storage nodes? I’m interested to know, how do you have FOG implemented? Thank you for your time, and I welcome any and all suggestions.