KK20

I guess I shouldnt have gotten rid of all those windows 98 licences 10 years ago It is interesting that W7 starter, XP starter are ok but vista starter isnt.

Since I will be moving over to the new EES scheme this opens up windows 7 upgrade options. After previously looking through the previous nightmare of W7 licensing (we didnt have a desktop agreement) I will need to reopen the can of worms again. All of our PCs are OEM and have XP professional on them (Dell OEM license). A few laptops have vista pro or even W7 pro but have been downgraded to XP. When I take the EES scheme is the W7 upgrade simply a paperwork exercise? i.e. will I use a normal W7 MAK key (i'll probably set up a local KMS host in reality) that I get from MVLS, create my relevant images (in the new W7 way) and away I go? Obviously each PC upgraded will need their rather tattered OEM XP pro sticker in place. Coincidentally, what is the cheapest available OS that qualifies for upgrade to W7? (I dont mean ebay). As an afterthought, is the W7 upgrade licence downgradable (in such way you could run office 2003 instead of 2010 should you so wish). I.e. I purchase a genuine XP home from ebay, put it on a brand new machine, but install our normal XP pro image on a machine utilising the license path of W7 upgrade option (downgraded to XP pro)?

Same as pete. I also run winaudit every few months (silent script on logon). then import the data into SQL just in case anyone comes a knockin'

MS still let you download XP from MVLS. Of course you need a correct key to work with the downgrade option.

Just fired my email off to Phoenix for some pricing. We dont have a desktop agreement (happy with the OS installed - CALs and office as schools agreements). But this will give us the option to upgrade OS now. I was worrying about the 100 minimum as we dont need that many (70 fte) if the minimum isnt 100 then I know i'll be saving around £1500 a year which is nice. Might splash out on enterprise CALS and get sccm forefront (just renewed sophos - damn) and just keep quiet about the cheaper licencing....

start at the top and work down. Plug a laptop into the router and check a direct connection. Next internet on the proxy server itself. If you can bypass the proxy as administrator try that. Check your DNS, is your client settings for DNS correct? Try pinging external IP addresses to check.

hah! im used to bodging things, no idea why I didnt think of this. Good work (my files were in /usr/share/webmin/dansguardian/ just in case other people have difficulty finding it)

No. I have a feeling that webmin has some kind of template and wont let you edit files outside of the template. Annoying as I cant set up webmin for trusted teachers. In the end I just live with it and use putty for those files.

I still use NTBackup - the old one copied from an XP machine. I added the location to %PATH% (the freshly copied NTBackup location) and all is good. The scheduled backups work fine. There is one caveat! VSS doesnt work so locked files wont be backed up. Allegedly there is a workaround using exchange files - I will be sorting this out at christmas when I migrate our exchange to ex2010/svr2008. I have a clonezilla image for bare metal restore (system drive) and the data is backed up via NTBackup now. The new windows backup was thoroughly useless since it didnt support network shares and im not using our "data" iSCSI drive link for backups (backups are on a different NAS not capable of iSCSI).

its a one way street. We have 1 2003 DC remaining in our 2008 domain (2003 mode). The remaining 2003 DC is our exchange server and that is going the way of the dodo at christmas. I had absolutely no issues moving our "pdc" (yes I know they dont exist but in my head this is our PDC ). Transferred all the roles the 2003 server without issue. I had no issues with GPOs although I moved a lot of "installation" GPOs so they needed to be changed to reflect the new paths. If you are moving user account data across then I cannot understate the value of this utility ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/pss/tools/Exchange%20Support%20Tools/ADModify/ it was shear magic in changing all the locations of profiles in one hit. Robocopy is also your friend. I decided to reshare manually as I "pruned" at the same time.

Ubuntu does have a minimum recommendation of 512mb RAM, think of ubuntu as being on par with XP as far as specs required. Try xubuntu or Lubuntu (if you want out of box operations) or CrunchBang if you dont mind tweaking a little (as recommended about 5 posts up). Pretty much anything with KDE will need 512mb+ even then you will be swapping.

I had many issues installing 64 bit HP drivers (4000, 3500 and 4600) in the end it was because the .inf file had "%%%PCL6" instead of "%%%PCL 6" a quick edit to add the space and on went the 64 bit drivers.

250 pcs here and an almost identical situation last year. I pursuaded our superiors of the time and cost to transfer and training vs disruption. We moved to OO instead of upgrading office 2003 to 2007 which saved us about 4k We then purchased old copies of office 2003 pro and put those on the admin staff and senior management for outlook only. *REMEMBER* if you have a hint of an MS server then its CALS all round (exchange too!), something that still rankles our bursar but hey ho what can you do. We didnt swap desktops to linux. I still purchase OEM licences for our PCs but I only buy dells. Why? Central recovery! Dell OS CDs have the dell product code on them. I too started photographing licence keys and I put our device labels next to the product key for identification. Unless you are a linux guru then you are mad to go down the whole route for 8k savings. Teachers will not simply switch all their documents to OO overnight. Presentations wont work, interactive boards will play up, printer drivers will be funny, that engraving machine in technology will be funny. God knows what the USB microscopes will do when they see linux. See the picture? It is not worth it for 8k a year and im guessing you are a one man band - like I am - so good luck keeping it running.

I use debian. I learnt to use linux on debian, the main reason is that there is tons of info out there on debian, perhaps not as much on other distros (my friend prefers CentOS). Debian has a few quirks about it (get rid of the fecking network manager as soon as you can). But I have those documented so I can get a server up and running quite quickly. Personally I would set yourself a goal and get that working. Do you have an internet filter? If not then have a go at setting up squid and dansguardian. That is a challenging project that will get your server mapped onto your domain and doing something useful. How about setting up an internal "pupil only" webserver so they can host their ICT projects? Also get used to working from SSH whether or not you put a GUI on. I always put a GUI on as a safety net so im not exactly a purist although I do use SSH from the minute I removed network manager. Did I mention I hated network manager? its apt-get remove network-manager oh yes, clonezilla is your friend. Once you get something working CLONE IT (or tar your system). The amount of times ive changed "something" and wished I hadnt...

I would just like to share my findings. Since I will be imaging 50 machines this summer I wanted to do something faster than plugging hard drives into my "clone machine" that has 8 sata leads hanging from it. So I have set up a DRBL clonezilla server and tested it. It worked. *first time* which was major shock to the system. Anyway, here is the walkthrough that I used. A vanilla debian machine (recycled optiplex 270 p4 80gb 1g ram). Installing / configuring DRBL with Clonezilla Server - Atomic 3.0 our image was a syspreped stripped XP sp3 and cloned via PXE before first boot. I then sent it out to 4 clients as a test. 1.2gb per min which wasnt too bad (over a LIVE network with no phoneline meltdown so it must have been fine) Next stage is to plug the clone server into our server iSCSI switch and configure that on a separate NIC and save the images on there. Oddly enough I now have an exact split of 4 MS servers and 4 linux ones - ISA, WSUS AV & print server, Exchange, DC SQL & dogsbody then internet firewall/filter (squid DG), two openfilers (1x iSCSI box with 4 NICS teamed on server only switch) 1x NAS general mapping, and now a clone server.

I have to disagree. Our openfiler is used as server backup (server OU RW only), media library (pupil OU RO, staff OU RW) and staff shared work area (staff OU only) and pupils shared area (pupils OU read only, staff OU R/W). It is a 4x 1Tb drive software RAID1 array. Currently it is only an SMB share although I do intend on bringing an iSCSI array online in the coming year. Uptime is 121 days as of now, never missed a beat and groups work just fine. I used the exact guide that librarian posted. "Use Windows domain controller and authentication": domain is my local "friendly" non FQDN name. DC is non-FQ friendly name. ADS realm is FQDN in capitals. Orginally I joined it to the domain. That was about that really.

I'm an old stick in the mud and liked the legacy grub Grub2 gave me a few headaches as I hadnt encountered it before. There are enough forum posts from proper bearded people that got me through it.

I did try ebox as a viable alternative for our DNS, firewall, filter and VPN server but in reality I couldnt get it to do what I wanted it to. Since my domain is primarily a windows AD domain, I had difficulties getting AD LDAP multi filter groups to work. I opted to continue paying the £ for ISA and use a dedicated squid/DG box for my filtering. DNS is still handled by the primary (overworked) windows server. My brain and training has always told me that an edge firewall should be an edge firewall and thats it. I know virtual servers muddy the water a bit but I still try to keep edge firewalls a separate box.

I still use the same script (havent touched it since incept) so i'll dig it up and have a look again for you. One issue I did have with it is that I oculd only get it to work for OUs *not* security groups. I must admit I didnt spend too much time as principally I have already set our AD structure to have OU of PUPILS and STAFF. lastupdate.filtergroupslist is literally that, a list of changes made during the last successful update. In short this file should mirror exactly dansguardians 'filtergroupslist' if the lastupdate.filtergroupslist is empty then no successful update has occured. You can tell if the script works because ALL of your names will whizz by. Here is a snapshot of a line during EXECUTION of the script: ou=Staff,dc=xxxx,dc=xxxx,dc=sch,dc=uk,dc=local - testaccount ou=Staff,dc=xxxx,dc=xxxx,dc=sch,dc=uk,dc=local - support staff ou=Staff,dc=xxxx,dc=xxxx,dc=sch,dc=uk,dc=John Doe inside both "filtergroups list" and "lastupdate.filtergroupslist" are the lines: testaccount=filter3 support staff=filter3 John Doe=filter4 administrator=filter4 Note that John Doe is a filter4, that is because in the file /etc/dansguardian/lists/admins.filtergroupslist I have the following John Doe Jane Doe Hence those two names will be set as filter4 even though they physically reside in the STAFF OU. You will also notice that administrator does NOT live in the STAFF or PUPIL OU but has been included as a filter4. That is because in the /etc/dansguardian/lists/template.filtergroupslist file I have the line: administrator The files /etc/dansguardian/lists/template.filtergroupslist and /etc/dansguardian/lists/admins.filtergroupslist must exist, even if empty! if your lastupdate.filtergroupslist empty? If so then there is a problem further up the script and i'll help you fix that. If it is full of names then add a test account to one of your OUs and run the script again, did the new account appear in lastupdate.filtergroupslist?

new ISC returns perhaps?

This is something I am wondering about. We will be changing MIS over the coming year or so and I would prefer to have some kind of access to the data underneath - for read only purpose i.e. custom queries. How easy is it to access iSAMS data? Is it encyrypted or just weird table format? I certainly remember accessing phoenix gold OMNIS data via an access spreadsheet (couldnt get a linked server in SQL running). Since I speak SQL I would much prefer an SQL approach rather than muck about with SIF!

source forge the beast if you do. Im sure people will fix it up for you if you get the basics.

no, as I said: "Microsoft ISA Server 2004/2006 with Winfrasoft X-Forwarded-For for ISA Server" it is supported with the software I linked to i.e. not natively supported.

I'd need to look up some more but it seems that ISA doesnt natively support X-Fowarded-For headers This I find odd but certainly the wiki seems to suggest you need X-Forwarded-For for ISA Server and IIS in order to do so.

no, squid doesnt pass this on by default as sometimes you dont want your internal ips leaking onto the net. Follow X-Forwarded-For headers