ADMaster

Hello all, I have WDS / MDT 2010 running on 2008 r2. I have a windows 7 machine getting a boot error I have seen this a number of times and my solution is always to image it. I read today that a startup repair may fix it. My question is can I run startup repair from WDS / MDT or PXE boot in general? Thank you,

If your servers are 2008 or newer you can call wbadmin from your batch file. Wbadmin This is what I run directly from the task scheduler wbadmin.exe start backup -backuptarget:\\backupserverip\Backups -allCritical -quiet

We use joomla for our main website, and I keep a Google site as an internal landing page for our computers with links to email, gradebook, helpdesk etc. If you want to stick with Google, I think Google sites would provide a bit more flexibility than blogger.

Can you give some more background about your wireless setup and laptops? We used to have a hodgepodge of wireless and some of our buildings would pick up on neighboring buildings wireless, this could be a possible cause. We now have unified SSID’s with a controller, and all the laptops get the wireless settings via GPO. I have never seen the errors you mention, but I get the message “there are no logon servers to service your request” The typical culprits are the wireless switch has been turned off. I recently discovered the laptops have a fn key that will also let you turn off the wireless. I need to investigate this more, I think that is the cause of half of my wireless logon issues. Some combination of making sure all the wireless is turned on, and a gpupdate /force usually does the trick. There are a few ocaitions were removing the machine from the domain and reading are needed. Some of our laptops go a month or more without use, they seam to have the most problems and I have always suspected machine account password issues, but a quick search leads me to believe that is not the case. Password Age for Machine Accounts do not expire - Action plans and problem solving - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Bottom line, wireless logon is a pain in my backside, check these settings. GPO always wait for network GPO configure wireless to auto connect Make sure wireless is on software and hardware switches. Gpupdate /force I can look at some of my GPO settings when I get in tomorrow. Hope this helps.

Hello all, I have a few questions / feature requests about how this forum works. I may be overlooking something, and hope I’m not asking too much. I visit the site every day and try to keep up with what’s happening and how everyone else is doing things, if I see a topic that either looks interesting or that I may be able to help with I read it and respond appropriately. However the new posts and today’s posts do not match up. Many days especially at the beginning of term I don’t have time until I am at home to read. So I expect not being on the site all day the today’s posts and new posts should be about the same. Don’t get me wrong I access the site at work if I have an issue but can’t justify casually reading it while we are so busy. Here are my questions; Can someone explain the difference between the what’s new and today’s posts? Can I filter the today’s posts to exclude certain forums or tags? We do not use SIMS here so filtering those posts out would help. Following the idea of filtering the new / today’s posts, can I filter out certain threads? Sometimes I see the same thread day after day because it is a hot topic or ongoing issue but does not apply to me. There are some forums that have multiple thread types, discussion and question. When I have the time I like to search for unanswered questions and see who I can help. Can we get a feature like this? Thank you,

What is the Action set to, it should be on Update or Replace. If it is on create, and the group exists it will not do anything, there is also a check box on the common tab that says apply only once. I have not used gpp for users and groups yet, but this is how it works for printers, in my experience.

If this is for many machines consider using GPO and disable Google updates, then download and push out the chrome msi. This way all your computers get updated on your schedule and should bypass the proxy issue. Use Chrome policy templates - Google Apps Help Chrome Browser for Businesses

I use windirstat WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics then just look for larger than average folders. I can also click on file extensions and see all those files highlighted. It's usually easy to spot the down loaders.

I’ve not used hyper V but can clients talk to your DC on x.x.x.2? If x.x.x.1 and x.x.x.2 are the same subnet and your clients are getting address from the correct range I wouldn’t worry too much. Should your hyper V nic be on a different subnet? Then your dhcp clients wouldn’t get an address from it.

Can you please provide more detail, it doesn’t sound like you are using group policy preferences. I recommend using gpp with item level targeting. Gpp will allow you to target an OU, or group, or just a few computers. When you setup gpp put all your settings in the computer section of group policy and then it should not follow the user. I am not as familiar with the deploy with GPO option, however two things to check. Is your test user in the same OU as the computers? Are the computers your testing with in the same OU?

You do not mention what age restriction you have enabled. Someone correct me if I’m wrong; If the minimum password set to 45 days the user cannot change their password within 45 days of its last change. Many of our teachers’ passwords expired over the summer and they are forced to change them when they come back. If this is your case then the teacher recently changed their password and cannot change it until the 45 days are up. However I would think that after an admin changed it and set must change password the user should be able to set their own, unless you have password history turned on. I will have to look up the tool tomorrow but there is a great dll you can register to give and extra info tab in AD with password last set, expiry date, last bad log on etc. Of course you can see all these easily with the attribute editor now. Nevertheless it is good info to look at when troubleshooting something like this. Finally we had a teacher that could not remember their password, so we set it to You could set it to and set not allowed to change password.

Just curious, why would you not want this, something obvious I'm missing? To the question, I like ntfsfix by wisesoft NTFSFix

I am surprised that no one has mentioned webhelpdesk. I have been using it for about a year and it is very easy to install and get working out of the box. You can setup and email address for it to check for new tickets or the user can log in to the web interface. When I was shopping for helpdesk software I tried webhelpdesk and sysaid side by side, they were very close. I think the deciding factor for choosing webhelpdesk is it is what our ITC uses. Although they were just bought out by solar winds this summer, so I don’t know how that will affect the product.

A number of remote admin tools allow you to add custom tools, just add the C$ share as one of your tools. I use PDQ inventory currently, but have also used skeep vnc. I was able to customize both to allow quick access to the C$ share.

The script looks OK to me, I was able to run it on my machine just changing the paths and it worked. I have two suggestions For your access error either reboot the server or go into the share session manager and kick everyone out. This will ensure no open files. Also check that your user has permission to the directories and all sub directories. I assume you’re using and admin account so this shouldn’t be the case, but never hurts to check. You will want to change the path in AD so they connect to the new share. If you do this outside of your script, what you have is fine. If you want to do it with in the script use UNC paths when moving their files so you can use the same newpath variable it the set-qaduser command. Hope this helps, Let us know if you get it working properly.

I just modified my user script to move home directories if their year group changes for some reason. don’t know what language you plan to use, I used PowerShell. If you just want to use the csv file you can use the import-csv command and the move-item command. If you want to moved based on OU get quest active directory cmdlets and use the set-qaduser and get-qaduser commands. This is not exact syntax so don’t copy and paste, I can look at details when I get in tomorrow if you need them. $users = Get-qaduser –seachscope domain/ou Foreach ($user in $users){ $home = $user.homepath $newhome = \\server\students\yeargroup\$user.samaccountname Move-item –path $home –destination $newhome Set-qaduser –identify $user –homepath $newhome } That’s off the top of my head with no syntax checking etc., but should give you a good start. Good luck

I use a combination of their name and student number which is information teachers have in the grade book and that the students should have memorized or have on their ID. I use last name + first initial + last four of ID. This serves three main purposes; 1. students and teachers can easily calculate the username. 2. There is a very minimal chance of having duplicates. 3. I can easily find the students in AD by last name, when I get a ticket about password resets. I emailed this formula and default password to all the teachers just before school starts, even though this has been the formula for a few years, I still get questions on what new student usernames are.

Hello Steve, Give group policy preferences a try. I set up the printers at the computer level and not the user level. I think winxp sp2 is required and their is a kb update to use gpp so make sure you have that installed. Also when you share the printer on the server, you need to set the print processor to winprint raw. Hope this works for you.

I have tried the method mentioned by soveryapt in the past but just don't trust it. I am in the habit of flipping the wireless switch when I plug in a cable.

In your case I would use bulk AD users as @ihaveaproblem said. It has an import from spreadsheet option. If there are similar tasks that need done on regular basis I would look at writing a powershell script. Quest Active directory cmdlets make it very easy to connect to AD and modify users. I use this is my all my AD scripts.

That is interesting, I just updated to 2.3 to see if the but was resolved in that version, and it is not. However having Moodle notify people of expiring passwords is more than I had before and should stop some of the helpdesk calls. I guess the question is can shibboleth or another free SSO do this and would it be worth setting up? Thanks,

Hello all, I currently have Moodle 2.2 installed and configured to use LDAP authentication to Active Directory and it is working fine. I recently changed the settings to use ldap over ssl so users could change their passwords via Moodle, that is now working. If a user has a password that will expire soon they get a warning and are able to change it, however if the users password has already expired they cannot login to change it. Any solutions to this within moodle, or will Shibboleth handle this situation? Thank you,

I don't know what your setup is but this should get you in the right direction. This is how I setup thinstation a few months ago. Tech Blog: Thinstation 5.0 and Windows Deployment Services

@Fred2k, I have 4 suggestions for you, OCS inventory NG GLPI Webhelpdesk PDQ Inventory I started with OCS and GLPI they integrate well together and OCS uses an agent. They are both free GPL Webhelpdesk is commercial helpdesk software with asset management. I like to use it to manage my static assets with serial numbers. I can assign people to each asset. It also supports many custom fields and allows you to import from spreadsheets so getting your data in is easy. My favorite is PDQ inventory there is a free and pro version. You can sync your computers in from AD and get hardware and software inventory. It's only down side is that it is dynamic, and updated with your AD, this is usually good but for records something static is nice. This is why I use webhelpdesk for assigning devices to people with serial numbers etc. and I use PDQ to keep track of software currently on the network and who needs software update xyz. Hope this helps.

I use a WSUS script from Rob Dunn that checks for installs then emails a report of updates installed. I am sure somewhere in that code are the functions you need. I think I found it in the spiceworks script center. Hope this gets you in the right direction.