PiqueABoo

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I'll definitely second that, as in don't assume it's just like 2K3 to 2K3 R2. I've got a very serious off-the-shelf 2K8 domain configuration process which exercises a wide variety of areas - recently patching that to work on 2K8 has been umm.. interesting[1]. And of course R2 is 64-bit only i.e. could be wrong, but I can't see there being an upgrade path from 2K8 32-bit to 2K8 R2 (and if there is I certainly won't be volunteering to use it). In plain 2K8? Where/how? You can already get deleted (actually tombstoned) objects back from 2K3/2K8 AD, but I haven't come across the friendly AD Recycle Bin except as a "new in R2". MS disagree, hence tombstoning.. 180 days since 2K3 SP1 isn't it? Probably cheaper to just run the relevant included-with-GPMC script as part of a pre-job command. There's some very handy stuff in than often overlooked GPMC scripts folder. Eh? Probably doesn't happen very often in real-life especially given the ability to "reanimate" tombstoned objects , but you can selectively restore bits of AD with ntdsutil. [1] GPO differences are my current headache - I get a lot of Component Status warnings in 2K8 R2 when modelling GPOs that were imported from a 2K8 GPO backup.

Deja vu. a) Printers are essentially a per user thing (whatever impression RM or anyone else may give you) b) You can deploy a printer with preferences in a GPO that is applied to all users and then set the targeting on a particular printer delivery preference to say it only applies on certain computers e.g. computers that are in your Room 27 OU... if it's Tuesday It's the targeting that make preferences interesting/useful.

Look in the client-side event logs - preferences are quite verbose (may have done but I don't believe I turned anything on for that behaviour)

Grrrr... well I used it! It's still there in the RC at least but nags you every time you run it. Combined with the fun and games you have to go through running a 32-bit AutoIT app (that I need to stay 32-bit) which calls a few commands like servermanagercmd that don't work unless you figure out the current architecture and start pre-pending folders (sysnative or system32), and I'm feeling a bit sulky.

Reality check: "Primary schools record an average bandwidth of 3.2Mbps, which is expected to increase to 4.1Mbps by April 2009. For secondary schools the levels are expected to increase from an average of 15.7Mbps to 21.1Mbps by April 2009."

That's their very first quarterly patch Tuesday in action then. It's useful to know when these things are coming, all we need is the rest of the Adobe stuff in sync.

Well you haven't done your homework then.. go forth and google or bing ;b

I happened to look and tried that when it was released a few days ago - couldn't make it fix the file open/save dialog using the wiki doc for doing it on 1.4. Has anyone got anywhere with that?

Public sector paying lip service to rules - happens all the time, has happened to me and yes I was very annoyed too (but as above, definitely happy not to be working for people like that). When I were a smallish lad I recall my mother (in education again) pointlessly travelled a long way to get burnt by that. She conditionally accepted offers for subsequent interviews i.e. "..provided there is no internal candidate".

You wouldn't be here if you were. The bit I didn't properly appreciate is that this is fundamentally about choosing between: a) Windows with RM's standard config & management tools b) Windows with ANOthers standard config & possibly scripts & probably one or two 3rd party tools. As in you would not be doing the inital domain config yourself. In that case server training isn't so urgent, but I'd keep that on the to do list anyway. The only key point for both then is do you get sufficient documentation and training on the ongoing management? What's the support like if something goes wrong in "their" bits. etc. Could be wrong, but around here I believe RM don't sell a primary a system unless the school's routine support person has been trained in or is signed up to a CC management course.

Haven't looked at it, but out of interest how does this meta-search thingy sit with the underlying search engines? Used to be they didn't like them at all because you're getting people what they want without them seeing all the Ads that are of course a key part of their business model

I know I don't know enough about TS, but the most obvious question is did you install it after a "change user /install" or not?

Moi? As stated above I was speaking generally, but no I wouldn't be impressed if someone decided to learn how to do a vanilla domain with the IT at my daughter's primary, or the primary where t'other half is a teacher. One of several real and sadly repetitive answers for my CCx sales "Why?" is simply because that scenario hasn't worked out so well. Yes and I learnt this as I went along myself, however I had some serious related qualifications/experience, and there were no training courses or exams for NT 3.1. These days it's easy to find training and it's also easy to practice on virtual machines rather than risking production systems. Question: Real-world IT jobs typically require exerience/qualifications of relevant core skills for good reasons. Why should IT in schools be a special exception? Speaking to you personally, if you don't have the experience then get say a Server 2008 course under your belt and then decide. SpecOps Deploy uses BITS and MSMQ (which is also important to CC4). Background deployment isn't something you can reasonably do with a bit of script wrapped around bitsadmin though. Don't know about anyone else, but for me the fundamental problem is that they require significantly more of my time than CC3 does. And I really resent that "change the package metadata e.g. space required on C:" = "new version of package" thing, the tracking where it came from and so on - an overdesigned solution to problems I haven't ever run into (perhaps they make sense for CC4-in-managed-BSF-mode, but I'm struggling to see why). Because it's got education written all over it (default groups, policies, folder structures and so on)? Don't think many would be thrilled at the prospect of taking one over and maintaining it (as opposed to redoing it to their standards) though. I think the main bit's you can't do natively or with other MS freebies are: -Flexible start menu delivery (CC4 does that in the background too). -Better than native s/w deployment. -Printing control. -Privileged users. -Make/Restore images CCx also has one GUI rather than being some diverse collection of apps, script etc. and of course you can't compete with the manuals and documentation. That's part of the credible detail I had in mind and they have done a reasonably serious job there. But like most 3rd-party s/w CC3 and CC4 have their own vulnerabilities. CC4 is a lot more closed/proprietory than CC3. In April 2014! The question is whether h/w in a couple of years will still boot XP. Vanilla then (but still do some training). Part of the justification for CC in a primary is that you don't need full-time support to run it and basically trade wages for CC licences. When CC4 is stable which may or may not be SR1, I'd be surprised if you found more than an average of days work a week to keep it ticking along.

I'm speaking to the general case in this thread, but RM don't seem to have had too much trouble selling into primary schools (when those schools have the money) which previously had support of some kind. Why? A vanilla setup **can** outweigh, again it depends on who made and maintains it. There's no argument that a decent one that doesn't charge per station and for deployable office packages etc. should be cheaper. Again I think the real rule was larger scales. Same code with the same bugs running on both. Not an expert on upgrades, but they have you rebuild all your computers and probably reset profiles(?). What exactly is carried over from CC3 then? Packages but they're not the reason. I have seen GPOs mentioned and I can believe that causes glitches if you were stubborn enough to want to hang on to them. Noting that I haven't seen a patch saying "for sites upgraded from CC3" then what else is specifically causing problems for upgrades? Premise: Majority upgrade = secondary, Majority new = primary. A 5% chance of a problem hits a few PCs at a primary and may not be seen unless they happen of Friday morning when a tech is on site, whereas a secondary tech might get 50 complaints. Similarly for amount of stress on the FR server e.g. more PCs means more stress and more chance of routine trouble if memory usage is an issue.

Ask them to explain why this kind of thing isn't a big issue for staff in large tracts of the real-world, or for that matter large tracts of the public sector?

Importantly: Without producing a pile of junk because you didn't have all the skills necessary for that process. There is a lot of credible work/detail in CCx and speaking as a bit of a rocket scientist, I am 100% certain it would take someone months of wall-to-wall work to reinvent and debug the useful bits **from scratch** on a vanilla. And you'd still need to add 3rd party print management, tutors, better s/w deployment if required.

Yeah but imagine how unhappy they'd be (and the school would be with them) if it was their name in the local press because they'd left some device containing confidential data in the pub. FWIW I think you've done the tech right.

CC4 SR1 is the current state for new systems, but as noted above it's early days and regardless of what that consultant said the verdict isn't in yet - perhaps by the end of this term. CC3 I can live with, but bugs aside I personally don't like CC4 because it seems bloated (all that code eating all that memory on stations is necessary to provide what?), a lot more proprietory (location is a DB field not an AD OU and so on) and one way or another has taken much more effort to administer (fun things like having to run that Package Update Utility). Meanwhile what makes this thread impossible: We know what CC4 is, but haven't got a clue what "vanilla" means. My vanilla is quite different from anyone else's. Some vanillas might be good, but some are complete disasters. We can't say whether CC4 will be the best choice unless we know about the alternative(s).

There is no native partition shrinking in 2K3 (and it has limits in newer Windows). Sorry, but I think you're stuffed - if you can't reboot it, presumably you also can't kick everyone off whilst you do a zap partition, recreate and restore (preferably from one of two backups). Whether you use 3rd party utils or not you need the server to yourself for a while. PS: Do you actually recall doing the extend wrong? Only I'm 99.99% sure there's a bug in the UI somewhere that may relate to how many times it has been extended before, where it completely ignores the smaller number you type in and uses all the available space.

No. What do the event logs say? BE 11d is at SP4 now.

Hmm.. if you want something that will add a wireless connection (complete with key) quickly then consider WZC Auto Provision from https://labs.arubanetworks.com [Can be used with some s/w deployment systems *if* you're happy to have a key flying about]

Although I think it's lost quite a bit of the plot, it will definitely do what you want. Conceptually it's pretty much like CC3, except of course it runs commands, batch files EXEs and the like rather than being so focused on MSIs.

Blame avoidance and *ability* i.e. they know they couldn't do it. Public sector pay isn't much of an incentive for talent, nor is the depreciated kind of time-serving career politics that's still alive and well in the public sector (any Western Euripean country). And are there any career progression paths in these places besides the one to Bureacrat[tm]? I've had a fair amount of contact with this world via t'other half whose first career as an "Interior Architect" was to try and make innovative artistic statements usable by real people. Thing is, although most architects get sentenced to a life of loft-conversions, a large part of it simply *is* about the art and artistic statements are what they are essentially trained to do.

"update-before-remove" sounds insane to me. I'm using a previous version for something but I hacked lots of bits out, added others in, changed the package XML schema (any bugs I found were reported back to the project - a 1.0x release was my fault). Had I started with this version, that feature would have been zapped. I think WPKG.js is too big, over-complex and trying to be too clever. I didn't find the code especially nice to work with, well in fact it's horrible if you're used to coding professionally to standards etc. It was convenient for me at the time, but "less is more" and I'll be writing my own code to do just what I want as soon as I get the time. All a bit sad when it's a free-lunch people are putting lots of effort into, but not unusual.