justinmglc

Whilst possible, this is unlikely for a number of reasons: Packet filtering on all incoming/outgoing traffic, so we'd catch it (hopefully) in that Machines that have HDGuard and no AV are student use machines only. The worst damage they could do is their own H:\ drive, in which case we'd just pull the last ShadowProtect snapshot and restore the data. Students cannot write to any network shares other than their own. If a staff member happens to use a student machine with HDGuard on it (doesn't happen often) and no AV, again the worst damage they could do is their own H:\ drive, for which again we can restore backups from, again with ShadowProtect. Staff have access to network resources they can actually write too - typically their own departments' public storage, in which case we can also restore from a backup

All good responses so far - let me address each one We don't run AV on our machines with HDGuard - they get blitzed after every session. Good thought on redirecting AppData - that could be a potential workaround.. not sure if it'll play nice. Strange, we've never seen that issue with excessive drive failures - we lost maybe 10-20 drives a year out of 2000 devices? Yes, we have defintley noticed the direct impact having HDGuard on there alone makes. We don't run AV on our HDGuarded machines for three reasons - the performance, as you mentioned, and the fact that update scheduling in HDGuard was a bit hit-and-miss back in the day, as well as we didn't feel the need due to the machines being HDGuarded. Yes - we have thought about including a local mandatory profile, but the problem with that is is we cock it up or need to make a change, the machines are protected by HDGuard Yep, that's what I'm leaning towards still. The software that freaks had been preconfigured in our captured profile. No doubt there was a %USERNAME% somewhere that got replaced. Interesting stats on your times there - is that from boot, login to desktop, or boot to login screen..? What would be an exact figure on that if you don't mind me asking? Thanks for the input so far guys, appreciate it!

Hi all, I'm dragging up this old thing for discussion again. Firstly, a bit of an explanation. We use HDGuard across 2000 devices, ranging from labs to laptops running on wireless. Because of the sheer size of our campuses, and the number of students that use these devices, it is pretty much a given that we have to use one of these products. We've been a HDGuard user for 7 years, and have always found it great. However, we are all know, there is a noticeable performance hit from running software like that on machines (we tested Deep Freeze and its performance hit was actually worse than HDGuard). So, our issue. Because of HDGuard, obviously our machines never save a profile onto a machine. The impact of this the students still need to build a profile every time they login to a machine, and we enforce a reboot when a student logs off. Also, regardless of whether or not the machine students login to has our full lab image on it (including Autodesk, CS6, Archicad, Office, etc), or just a 'slimmer' version (Office + Basics), the time from boot to desktop can be anywhere between 3-5 minutes. Now, I'm not sure how that compares to other schools, but for us it is unacceptable. This is on brand new hardware, but the issue with this is the disks in the machines are just too slow (5400RPM drives, probably 'green'). Now, when it comes down to it - these are my questions and discussion points: For environments that use HDGuard/DeepFreeze/Similar, what is your typical time for a machine to boot, a user to login, and a usable desktop environment to be up? For environments that don't use HDGuard/DeepFreeze/Simlar, what is your solution to keeping machines clean? Do you schedule imaging? Do you just trust your AV? Do you use Mandatory Profiles, and if so, how does that impact your network when you have 400-500 devices logging in in a period change? How does your WiFi hold up for that? Have you noticed any performance hits? If you do use mandatory profiles, and we have dabbled with that in the past, some software still generally freaks when it tries to do things with the user profile. ArchiCAD is one that comes to mind. How do you deal with that? Anything else to discuss or points to raise? Thanks in advance, Justin