PiqueABoo

So if I throw a Win7 box + RSAT on a network with 2008 DCs will that let me manage Win 7 policy? [And do I need to do that or can I just steal the latest ADMXs?]

PXE is fairly ancient, and is often easier to invoke (for the immediate boot only) on older machines. If there's no PXE at all you can get a floppy or CD to do it... there's a site somewhere (don't have the link sorry - may be the "etherboot" site) where you tell it what NICs you want and it makes you a custom ISO.

So can't you move their folders under two different places e.g. ..\Students\Standard\ ..\Students\Media\ Then use different Auto Apply quotas on the parents (Standard = 1GB & Media = 2GB)? Or just do the same with all students then manually override the auto-applied quota with a 2GB one for media students?

I'm sure it works for most folk, the trouble with BE is that sometimes it just doesn't (this is a fresh/clean/SP2 + fully patched OS install).

There's nothing in it that makes me want to rush.

I've come to the conclusion that the name "BE for Windows Server" is a bit of a crock. Having lots of experience, I can't think of one version since 9 that was stable until it got to at least SP3. I'm currently having fun with BE 12.5 on a 2008 (not R2).. this was released after Server 2008 and doesn't like it if you've got DFS-R replicating SYSVOL. There is no supported way to set replication back to FRS. Could be I haven't done enough LiveUpdate and server reboot cycles[1] and it will eventualy work, but for now the only way to stop BE saying SYSVOL is corrupt is to stop the DFS-R service for the duration. Windows Backup doesn't complain at all, but with that being so crippled now this is a fact that's not much help. [1] You'd have thought it might pop up a dialog same way it used to after installing SPs, but I've seen BE LiveUpdates install things and quietly log a "needs a reboot" event. Thus I reckon you should always reboot after BE updates just-in-case.

In a nutshell: So you can Debug your code with the Debugger, which needs the all-powerful system seDebugPrivilege right. There may be lots of other little reasons because it's primarily for professional developers and most of them need local admin rights for lots of reasons associated with the process i.e. there's not a lot of incentive for MS to make it work in significantly restricted environments.

RM released a 3.5 SP1 recently for CC3 & CC4.

That 69.2MB update is a standalone exe of the SP1, plus further exes for each of KB95848[1|3|4]. Add that to an installed 3.5-with-no-SP and you are almost up-to-date (WU reports a couple of other little non-critical KBs). This is a mystery then: I've just taken your pack and recursively extracted things so I'm happy to confirm it has the 3.5-with-SP1-included installer in it. Perhaps my trouble relates to one of the post SP1 KBs not installing for some reason, and it would have to be the 3.0 one because it's a too old version of a file in there that gave me the trouble. I'll see if I can repro this on a couple of other boxes sometime this week and post the results. Meanwhile do you actually need the 2.0 & 3.0 installers in the pack i.e. doesn't the 3.5-with-SP1 installer contain those?

Sorry Michael, but I think the Service Pack 1 for 3.5 *may* be missing. MS dotNet packages confuse the hell out of me, so I grabbed yours and threw it on a box a couple of weeks ago. On going to MSUpdate it wants to put this on: Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.5 Family Update for .NET versions 2.0 through 3.5 (KB951847) x86 [1]. Which is 69.2MB, and apparently should be followed by the KB958481/3/4 patches that are already in your Pack. [1] I grabbed it from here.

Hmm.. I may well go for that. I'd been contemplating the current MS layout (3 vertical panes) for pretty every management GUI... programs groups obviously go in the left pane, shortcuts in the middle, but I couldn't think what to put in the right pane. Seems obvious with hindsight having looked at that Ubuntu Screenshot now, but yes that's an ideal place for file system shortcuts (drives, folders).

I surrended this evening and have just half-done my very first WPF app which was interesting. I've sorted out the basic ingredients, that is enumerating start menu folders for *.LNKs, obtaining and displaying the big icons that lauch the apps. Half-done because I'm struggling to think of a plausible GUI layout that would be significantly different from "RM Explorer" and for some reason that pains me. Sooo... is there anyone out there who has seen the aformentioned RM app and thought "That would be much better for these little kids if they'd done X"? If so, what was X? [Probably will anyway, but I promise to give the result away if I get a compelling answer]

RC released last week.. shouldn't be a long wait... and shouldn't be like 2007 RTM i.e. a bit feature deficient.

I'm on Arthur's side, but but would auto-logon and locking the desktop at the start of whateve happens work? For XP this command does that: C:\WINDOWS\system32\rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation

I'll second that hooray! Reason being I very recently agonised over whether to install 2K8 or just released 2K8 R2 for something. I cautiously settled on 2K8 which is good because the above items are both show stoppers (I couldn't have waited for them to be fixed). Vindicated :: phew ::. I've been knocking that out by default on 2K8 (too much ipconfig output to wade through otherwise). Exchange is (or should be) a dedicated app server or two .. or three ... Do you really care? Not having hundreds of virtual servers to throw around I don't care that much about live migration, will be useful very infrequently. CSV is definitely good though.

Thanks, good job. There's a line in there about W7 and MS saying if it's your h/w is good enough for XP it's good enough for Vista. Should that be good enough for W7? And what do folk who've been playing with W7 really think the spec should be? A comment on the stuff about 2K8 R2 HV and live migration.. that's obviously desirable, however the non-live migration on a decent 2K8 HV failover cluster is very quick e.g. I've seen it (suspend, move, resume) happen in < 30 secs. That might be too much in seriously big server farms, but it's not so critical at school scales. It's the CSV multiple VMs & VHDs on one volume I really want because that should make it *much* easier & efficient to configure/manage than with 2K8 (all those LUNs for each VM etc.). And MS actually use MDT themselves. Please take a hint everyone.. it will mean there's somewhere else to ask questions next time I get stuck with it!

Just skimmed the school's powerpoint and was interested to see they, like me, love MDT. Although I've yet to try the next version MDT 2010 (the RC was released a few days ago). I've played with SCCM for HV cluster management, but desktops is still on the to-do list. Two questions for anyone who does use it: How much does it cost education? What are the SCCM overheads i.e. what hardware does it need? You get there summer 2011? With MS apparently threatening Windows 8 in 2012 that's just one year before you're out of date again

Interesting, you can run that on an otherwise Windows box (Sugar on a Stick - a VirtualBox VM you boot from USB) but it doesn't match the requirements.

I could use some kind of app launcher to run at startup that's a bit less fiddly for very young kids e.g. Early Years. Something like this command would do but C: is hidden and un-explorable via GPOs so it won't work: C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe "%userprofile%\start menu\programs\early years" I could point that at somewhere that isn't un-explorable C:, but that would be across the network and I could also put the links on their desktops, but I'd rather not do either of those if there's a little app somewhere that can do the trick. Worst case I'll probably write one, but I suspect it's a teensy bit harder than it seems. Basically all I need is something you can point to a folder with LNKs in that will display them as nice big icons and launch them. Any ideas?

I wouldn't worry too much since it's the logging that's not happy, not the printer install. Meanwhile, that error code 0x80041002 appears to turn up in combination with WMI quite a bit and the WMI repository (system32\WBEM) is one of those places that can get mangled by badly made MSIs that have erroneously captured files from there etc.

Anyone who went care to do a brief summary?

Unless that server only has student accounts, personally I would want to end up with: H:\RMUSERS\Students\Year 10\JBloggs H:\RMUSERS\Students\Year 11\PSmith Have you done it yet? If so how fast was it? Seemed to take ages when I last went through essentially the same process.

That's more like it. Basically it's a bunch of marketing tat same as "web 2" (which in some circles is now a derogatory term e.g. "web 2 generation" is often used a kind of alias for illiterates with minute attention spans).

Well here's a thought.. I believe MS W2K3 [& R2] *mainstream* support ends next summer. You then get the extended security stuff for another 5 years, but I'm not sure I'd want to be seen shipping new 2K3 R2 systems next summer. And because of the x64 thing I wouldn't want to be shipping x86 2K8 [R2] boxes either. IOW I'd want everything running on 2K8 R2 x64 within a year (after which you start on the migration).

Interesting.. what does the context menu look like? If you r-click it do you have Open Home Page on the menu? If so is that or Create Shortcut in a bold font? If Open Home Page isn't right on that menu then it's likely that you've got a broken/missing set of shell open reg settings under some ugly GUID in HCR\CLASSID. [Don't have an IE7 to hand so I can't help with the GUID]