ScottStevinson

Hi Guys, I'm retiring an old physical server running W2k3 in favour of a virtual W2k8R2 box. Problem is that this server has (and has always had) the deployment share for group policy deployed MSIs. There is no DFS in place, and the GPOs point directly to the MSI installers. I've tried removing the entry in the GPO and selecting the "allow users to continue using the software but prevent new installations" option, and then re-adding the software with the new path but this still causes a redeployment even though the software is already installed. Is there any way to get this job done without every machine on site redeploying every piece of software?! Cheers S

I forgot to mention the twin 3kVA APC UPSs which provide the power to those two servers in a redundant configuration! We're running around 100 machines off of that setup - currently in the process of moving it all to Windows 7/2k8 R2. As you will know, teachers have high demands for uptime, reliability and general speed of using things, and thankfully our SMT generally understand the importance of this when it comes to Teaching and Learning. Look at the long term TCO though...the two HP boxes cost a little over £2k each when new and they've got a lot of life left in them yet! If you invest well in your infrastructure (I'm not saying go over the top though), you can be ready to expand whenever it's asked of you. All this new creative curriculum stuff with video cameras is a prime example!! S

My advice to the OP here is to buy the most expensive/expandable server chassis you can get your hands on. 3 Years ago, we bought two HP ML350 G5 boxes, each with 1x Xeon Quad Core 1.86GHz Processor, 2GB RAM, Single PSU, 2x 72GB 10k SAS Disks in RAID 1. One of these also had 4x146GB 10k SAS Disks in RAID 5 and an LTO2 tape drive for backups. We also had three other, older, physical servers running various other things. Since then we've expanded them massively and I've been very impressed with the results. I've used VMWare ESXi to migrate our 5 physical servers into virtual machines on top of the two HP servers. The next phase of this is to migrate to 2k8 R2 and split out some services but that's another topic. Both servers now have redundant HP PSUs, one has 11GB RAM, the other 8GB. Both now have 4x146GB RAID 5 Arrays to hold VMs, and there's still plenty of scope to add a second processor, up the RAM to the maximum 32GB per machine, add external SAS disks for additional storage, add fibre NICs, etc, if it was ever needed. My main message here is not to be fooled by the false economy of buying a cheap as chips server. Buy a higher model chassis, but keep the component spec relatively low. A reputable company like HP will continue to supply parts to you for a considerable amount of time. Touch wood, I'm still having no problems sourcing parts for my 2007 models. Any advice/help you need on the set up/config, give me a shout. I'm a Primary NM myself and, having built the lot from scratch, have probably previously hit most of the snags you'll encounter along the way! S

It's the software which comes on the camera - similar to those U3 memory sticks that have software loaded on them. When you plug the camera in, the windows "what would you like to do?" box pops up, and the top option is edit using the software provided on the device. If you view the camera in explorer, there's a flipshare.msi file there; however, if you use command prompt and do "msiexec -i flipshare.msi -quiet" it does nothing. Try double-clicking the msi and the error I mentioned above appears. Irritating thing is that I don't actually need the software. I need the codec which it comes with - it's not free! S

Following on from my thread about buying some cameras, some nice new Flip Minos appeared on my desk today. They seem to be good bits of kit and when I saw that there was an MSI file included I thought that the software deployment would be easy. Seems I was wrong. If you try to run/msiexec the msi file directly you get the error "To setup FlipShare, exit this dialog and click Finish, then run Setup_fileshare.exe". The .exe installer works fine, but I don't want to spend hours running around dozens of machines! Any ideas? S

Hi All, Looking for a bit of help here. Our headteacher has pointed me in the direction of this website: Open Futures – filmit We're trying to work out what type of camera the child in the image is using. Googling "FilmIt" doesnt show much except this: 0179 filmit guide 05.indd Still can't find any info on exactly what they are/how much they are/where they can be bought from? Anyone know anything about this? S

I'd already recreated the policy from a 2008 R2 server. Don't worry though - I've found a solution. I tracked the fault down to being only on accounts which had already logged onto the 7 client during setup/configuration. Redirection worked fine for everyone else. The logical solution from there was to delete the local profiles for these users by going to Control Panel : System : Advanced System Settings : User Profiles. Gpupdate /force /boot, and upon next logon everything worked nicely Note to self: Time to try and get GPP Printer Deployment working (Print server is 2k3 R2 so drivers are an issue) Scott

@nephilim: I assume your post was aimed at me Until recently, my network was 2k3 R2/XP. I've upgraded all but one of the DCs to 2k8 R2 which has been fine with all my XP clients. I've now got Windows 7 both on my laptop and on a dedicated test machine. Originally, I made no policy changes when upgrading to 7 and had no success with folder redirection on either machine. I did a bit of reading online, and somewhere read a comment about the policy needing to be a new one from a 2k8 R2 machine in order to be 7 compatible. How true this is, I don't know, but I tried it and it made no difference. The error message "Folder Redirection failed due to the error listed below. Cannot complete this function." is neither discriptive or helpful, and very little came back with I googled it I'm going to try it with a pupil's account later to see if it's just the administrators group that it doesnt work for... S

The new policy was created from a Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition machine. Interestingly, If I login with some other accounts, the redirection seems to work differently. As the BUILTIN\Administrator account, only the music folder redirects. As my personal admin account (also Enterprise Admins group) Music, Photos and Videos redirects. As the generic teacher test account, documents works too. I'm wondering if it's only failing on accounts which were used before the policy applied properly (I.E. the BUILTIN\Administrator one). I've tried deleting my folder from the c:\users directory but that didn't help either. Am I doing something stupid? S

Hi All, I'm experimenting with a Windows 7 test machine at the moment, but I can't seem to get folder redirection to work. Originally I just expected that the documents redirect which was already in place would continue to work, but I couldn't get anywhere with it. I'd heard people say that the policy needed to be re-created from a server 2008 r2 box, so I used an "XP only" WMI filter on the old GPO, and created a new one with a "7 only" WMI. Looking at RSOP on the Windows 7 PC tells me that only the new policy is applying. This is as expected; however, the following error is listed under folder redirection: "Folder Redirection failed due to the error listed below. Cannot complete this function." I've done the usual GPUpdate etc to no avail. Any ideas folks? S

OK So I've just written a nice long post about this, only to find out that my session had expired so message lost! Basically, I've just been told that our new digital blue cameras (with the flimsy fold out screens) have never worked (they were bought some time last year). The original ones work fine. On investigating further, it appears that there aren't any drivers anywhere (even the ones on the digital blue website don't work). Does anyone have a link to ones that do?? Thanks Scott

Sorry to bring back such an old thread, but I've been searching for an answer to this very problem without much success so far. I would like all users to go through one ISA proxy, and then be forwarded to the appropriate upstream LEA proxy for their user group. For example, the "learners" group should be web chained to example.lea.gov.uk:1234 and the "staff" group to example.lea.gov.uk:4321 I can create multiple chaining rules, but I've not spotted a way to restrict this by user groups. If this isn't possible in ISA 2006, does anyone know whether it can be done in the new Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010? Thanks Scott

Sun StorageTek 9990V System - Overview Also, anyone fancy a $250k SAN?

Sun Fire X4450 Server - Overview This looks nice Get 4x Quad-Core Xeons in there along with 64GB RAM...Couple that with 4x Gigabit NICs and redundant power and you're laughing. Plenty of PCI Express Expansion so give it a 10GB backbone connection there and HBA for the SAN and VMWare is ready to go... (Wishes he could afford about four of them )

Thanks from me also admins! Edugeek were being rather generous with the freebies and the pizza was lovely. Really good to put names to faces as well. Hope to see you all there next year. Scott