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garethEds

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  1. garethEds
    My last post on our Windows 7 development was back in March of 2010 - I didn't realise time had passed so quickly. Anyway - it has and so I thought I'd pop back into blog writing mode and bring this topic to an end.
     
    Much has changed since I started writing the Windows 7 blog posts. We have seen a change of technician and @rich_tech is now employed at the school. Since this time we have pushed the network forward with a complete migration to Windows 7 Enterprise and Office 2010.
     
    In the months leading up to the Summer holidays we picked up where I had initially left off (and taken a break). We made sure MDT2010 and WDS were all up to date and that WSUS was ready to download Windows 7 updates. Once this was done out came the MDT2010 books and websites - all of which are listed in this Edugeek post: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/o-s-deployment/76099-mdt-resources.html
     
    One room (my room) was migrated/upgraded and tested over the period of a month. It all went very . Printers were working and we prepared to push out to another two iCT rooms. No-one was complaining but there was plenty of excitement from the kids. We were a two OS school - XP/Office2003 and 7Ent/Office2010.
     
    So we broke up for the Summer. I was not too well in the months leading up to the holidays so had decided not to go in at all over the Summer. Usually I do but I needed the break. @rich_tech was in school for a few days/weeks so did some work.
     
    When I got back in the Summer most of the site was upgraded. I went on to offer training to which no member of staff turned up. A few weeks and the whole job was finished. Every machine (except one) was Windows 7.
     
    Did we have any issues? Yes - Sibelius 5 wouldn't play so we had to fund a Sibelius 7 upgrade. All good there.
     
    IE9 caused some issues - so we had to put in a script (found on here) that created some sort of 'low' directory which enabled web page printing.
     
    So there we are - a full term in and we are happy with the migration and ready to move on to our next group of projects.
     
    Thanks everyone for their help and advice on the WIndows 7/OS Deployment forums - it was invaluable.
     
    Gareth
  2. garethEds
    As I am a full time teacher I often have to put that work first and this week has seen me focussing on GCSE coursework.
     
    However, everyone needs a break and this morning I managed to sysprep a clean profile following information I found on the internet. I created a brand new unattend.xml file and expected the worst - it worked first time and I managed to copy the default profile over to our profile server.
     
    I've changed the ntuser.dat to ntuser.man and now feel I am further on than before.
     
    What information did I follow? Well here it is:
     

     
    Not sure how much use it is to others out there. I also read the WSIM docs to get some clarification.
     
    I hate reading docs and like to just plough in but in this instance it has helped.
     
    Now - machine has deployed but I had to put in the machine name. Similar to how RIS used to be.
     
    I can also type in the OU but I'd rather that was a drop down box as I cannot remember every OU we have - plus it's very long.
     
    Ideally they would be pre-staged but I cannot get the unattend.xml file to pick up %machinename%. I've just seen one custom.ini file that says %computername% so am going to try that.
     
    In the meantime does anyone want to add anything?
     
    Gareth
  3. garethEds
    Last Night
    Following my post last night on starting our journey with Windows 7 and MDT2010 I've found that Google is my friend.
     
    Now not just Page 1 of the Google results, but I decided to go deeper into Google. By the time I had reached Page 5, 6 and 7 I'd found some really excellent stuff. From hints and tips to white papers on MDT2010 - all very good stuff. I'll prepare a list and try and work out how to post it to the Edugeek Wiki.
     
    The point being that there is a lot of tosh referenced by Google. I am guilty of often only looking at the first page. I wonder if anyone else here is the same. I now have a mental note to myself to go deeper into the search pages.
     
    This Evening
    We've had a parents evening today so after having my tea (interesting this isn't it! - I had stir fry with salmon steak tossed in soy sauce, chopped chilly and some honey) - I've started to look up information regarding creating the unattend.xml files using Windows System Image Manager which is part of the Windos 7 AIK.
     
    A look at the technet stuff is interesting but as usual there is a lot of unofficial stuff out there.
     
    The best site I've come across are the forums at :
     
    http://www.windows-noob.com
     
    The link to the post on Windows SIM is:
     
    http://www.windows-noob.com/forums/index.php?/topic/575-what-is-windows-sim-and-how-can-i-use-it/page__s__2fdb5fbf6f4c29994b9d1d9d7b157e96
     
    I've not had chance to play yet but I have a few hours tomorrow to play with creating my own answer file based on what I am going to read.
     
    I'll be back to comment. Until then, thanks for reading.
     
    Gareth
  4. garethEds
    Introduction
    With LEA plans to update the AD we are starting to look at the deployment of Windows 7 Professional across the school - I'm quite excited about it but am aware that it isn't going to be an easy ride.
     
    I am busy collecting and collating information, trying out tools, trying out methods and so on.
     
    Current Information
    Our current setup is a WDS server running on a Windows 2008 server. It deploys Windows XPSP3 and works really well with our pre-staged machine names. It's not a big image as the large majority of our software is deployed via GPO. Basically if it isn't GPO'able then I don't bother with it :-) I have made some custom GPOs and we purchased AdminStudio last year to do this.
     
    The main application installed onto the image is Creative Suite 3 Master Edition. The installation issues with this are well documented across the internet. We could use a script but decided on putting it into the image.
     
    At the moment the Windows XP image covers all of our machines. It is universal.
     
    Project Plan
    So my plan over Whistun is to move the school over to Windows 7 Pro and upgrade our Office installation to 2007 (although this maybe 2010). All of the GCSE and ALevel projects will have gone so there will be no worry about pupils getting confused during their coursework periods. The teachers are another matter..... :-)
     
    Where I have Reached
    To begin with I have worked with WDS. I created a reference WIndows 7 installation - didn't bother with any software whilst testing. I captured it and saved it back to the WDS server. This worked as I expected it to.
     
    I updated the WDS boot.wim file so that it could cope with Windows 7 and managed to deploy the reference image. As expected it asked me for machine names and other setup information. I realise I need to create some sort of sysprep.inf file or whatever the newer version is called.
     
    Then I started reading my Windows 7 Reference Manual. This tells me I should be deploying using MDT2010 (with WDS if I want). So I install it and follow the instructions to capture an image. Again this works and I now have an MDT2010 image of Windows 7 Pro. I've also imported the images from WDS (including the XP ones). I've deployed it using the Light TouchPE boot file.
     
    Then came the end of the day and I went home.
     
    Where I want to Go Next.
    So where next? The next step is making this Windows 7 installation totally automated. I'm not quite sure how to do this so I am collecting information.
     
    Do I go for the unattend.xml file that I can create with the Windows System Image Manager or do I go with WDS.
     
    I've probably got the terminology wrong here and possibly the concepts. I know what I want to do and that is use MDT2010 as this is the recommended option.
     
    So hopefully someone will hold my hand as I go through this.
     
    The following now needs to be done:
     

    Deploy the image
    Automatically join the domain with the pre-staged machine name
    Bring the machine to the logon screen
    Several restarts to pick up various GPOs that will eventually be in place - such as various software installations.
    Then I want to:
     

    Create and capture a user profile that can be used for the main school mandatory profile.
    Sort out the libraries and hide what needs to be hid.
    Tie down the OS
    The End
    Once I am happy with the test machines I will roll out to my classroom - 30 machines and test there.
     
    Maybe I'll blog a bit more about this, but in the meantime thanks to Synack for helping me a bit today and pointing me to some websites.
     
    If anyone else has advice, reference material etc I would love to read it.
     
    GJE
  5. garethEds
    Well what do I say about that game - Wales were awful in the first half whilst Scotland imploded in the secon half.
     
    Scotland didn't need to make mistakes - they shouldn't have had anyone sent off. It was sheer stupidity.
     
    The discussion as to whether the Referee should have let Scotland kick off is one that may go on for a while - but he did so that's that. Scotland could have kicked straight out and the game would have been over - but.....
     
    .... they didn't and Wales played on to score with Shane Williams. An amazing passage of play.
     
    So - quick verdict - Scotland should have won with 7 minutes to go. They imploded - they lost.
     
    The second half was a good advert for rugby.
     
    Now.... come on France. A win here for France may lower their guard a bit. A loss for France will bring them to Wales in a bad mood,
     
    And finally...... good luck Italy tomorrow :-)
     
    Gareth
  6. garethEds
    Being a proud Welshman, it's that time of year again - the Rugby Six Nations. The yearly round of rugby internationals. The series of matches that doesn't really mean anything unless we beat the English.
     
    Kelly Jones sang "As long as we beat the English, we don't care" and as much as quite a few people on here are English and I risk the flames - it is true.
     
    The Welsh play England on Saturday and as usual it will be this game that the nation of Wales will base it's mood for the rest of the year!
     
    So if you are a fan of the Sixth Nations and you are Welsh - let's sing aloud... "Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi...."
     
    If you are a fan and you are any nation other than England - do us a favour and beat them :-)
     
    As for England fans? I'm only joking - good luck to you. Good luck to your team - just don't beat the Welsh.
     
    On another note - is anyone doing the Fantasy Rugby? If you are interested, there is a good one here:
     
    http://scrum.fantasyleague.com/
     
    My fantasy team this year is:
     
    15: Byrne (Wales)
    14: Williams (Wales)
    13: O'Driscoll (Ireland)
    12: De Luca (Scotland)
    11: Bowe (Ireland)
    10: Trinh-Duc (France)
    9: Cusiter (Scotland)
    8: R.Jones (Wales)
    7: Moody (England)
    6: Bergamasco (Italy)
    5. O'Connell (Ireland)
    4. Borthwick (England)
    3. Payne (England)
    2. Castrogiovanni (Italy)
    1. Szaezewski (France)
     
    Night everyone,
     
    Gareth
  7. garethEds

    A Little Further into WDS

    By garethEds,

    My last post mentioned that we were trialling FOG as a distribution server. We did that and now are trialling WDS - it hasn't been a smooth journey.
     
    If you read the last blog I mentioned that our RIS server broke so we were looking for another method of deploying Windows XP across the school. Our LEA don't support Vista so we have been XP for a while and will be for some time.
     
    In my 3 year plan I want (eventually) to move the school over to Windows 7 so I wanted a deployment server that would let me do this. Most (if not all schools in the LEA) use WDS or RIS - nobody I know of used Fog so I felt I could call on the expertise of the technicians in the LEA who had experience using WDS on the County Domain.
     
    So I set about installing Windows 2003 R2 and then WDS. It all went smoothely - the install. We couldn't authorize the server in DHCP so the LEA had to do that. Not sure why because we are Domain Admins on our part of the network. Anyway it seems like we needed to be Enterprise Admins. This has now been changed and permissions given for future stuff.
     
    So authorising the server happened and I followed instructions to get a PE image and a boot.wim file in there. I made the capture images and everything looked good. So I went on to create a capture image - amazing I thought - this is easy. Installing software took some time but it was done and I was happy with what would be called the Non CS3 Universal Image (I followed some instructions to make it Universal). MySysPrep was downloaded as were the driver packs. Image taken!!! Happy me.
     
    Deploying was a different kettle of fish. Booting in the deploy part was good as was authenticating to the domain. But.... 'No Images Found' was the message given. The LEA looked, I looked and reinstalled - nothing was working.
     
    I looked at the prestaging stuff and got error messages about our WDS server not being a Remote Installation Server. Weird stuff. Posted on here and got some help - but the error still remained.
     
    The LEA then turned around and said - why not move our DHCP to a Windows 2008 server and put WDS on the same server. Fine by me. All done.
     
    Lo and behold - everything (almost) now works. We have our first ever Win2008 Standard server installed as a member server with DHCP and WDS. It looks good - I like it. It's not R2 and the server is not 64bit but it is a dual quad core Dell PowerEdge 2950 rack with 4Gb of RAM. Over kill? It was going spare!
     
    The test image showed up (for some reason twice) in the deployment screen and I managed to re-image a machine. I now need to tweak the sysprep configuration file to make sure that works properly.
     
    The pre-staging still isn't working and for some reason the AD is not seeing this as a remote installation server even though when we search for it in the machine properties window (in AD) we can see it. Stumped with that one. Any ideas?
     
    So there we are - I think we will be sticking with WDS for now and working through the issues whilst I build images.
     
    Your comments on this are welcome. Thank to everyone who has offered advice on the way - Edugeek truly is the place to be for technical knowledge. Is there anywhere else like it? (For free?) I don't think so.
     
    GJE
  8. garethEds

    Getting Lost in the Fog

    By garethEds,

    A combination of things has moved me towards deploying images instead of using RIS cd based setups. These were:
     
    1. Our RIS server broke.
    2. Reading about a lot of summer jobs on here where people were talking about images and creating new ones
    3. How long it used to take the machines to be ready from building, to WSUS'ing and then to installing the GPO based software and then installing Adobe CS3 with the script.
     
    So I decided to take a look at three options.
     
    1. Rebuild the RIS server
    2. Move to WDS
    3. Look at a Fog server based on what I have read here.
     
    I discounted the RIS server. Let's move on. I've tried the move to WDS but maybe I have been spoilt with the RM build and RIS processes where you are asked to enter a machine name. This was great in the day - but WDS wasn't letting me do it. The LEA are writing a script at the moment to help me out.
     
    So today I tried going with Fog. Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop was installed onto a Celeron 1Gb machine. It went on well but because we are behind an authenticating ISA server (at the LEA) I couldn't get connected to download any updates or the Fog application.
     
    A quick chat with a friend (Tim Lloyd of Censornet) pointed me to this website:
     
    http://utcursch.wordpress.com/2007/01/28/isa-proxy-authentication-woes/
     
    A quick follow of the instructions and we were soon on our way. Ubuntu updated itself. Hoorah.
     
    Fog downloaded but when installing it stopped on (I think I remember) base-image - so that package had to be removed, purged and re-installed individually. A quick re-install of Fog went through and I soon had the service up and running.
     
    Next step - using the Fog docs on their site was to register one client and run some tests. So after checking the PXE boot options we were ready to go. But..... NO joy - timing out at the TFTP part after connecting to DHCP and getting an address.
     
    A quick dash to the Fog forums and the answer was found here:
     
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeghost/forums/forum/730843/topic/3276833
     
    Eventually the MemCheck test worked. It was then 4 o'clock and five a side football was calling.
     
    The next job is to create two universal images - one with CS3 and one without CS3 (as we have some Celeron machines). A message from R0M on here has provided me with some advice. This website also looks as though it could be handy:
     
    http://www.msfn.org/board/howto-using-driverpacks-w-sysprep-t99991.html
     
    So let's see how it goes. I've got some new spotlights so let's hope I don't get lost in the Fog.
     
    GJE
  9. garethEds
    If it wasn't for the British and Irish Lions this Summer I would not have coped with my rugby withdrawals.
     
    Tonight Cardiff play Edinburgh and my team - The Ospreys play Connaught away.
     
    The Autumn internationals are looking and I am already starting to plan my weekly get togethers to watch the games.
     
    Wales v England is always the one to watch in the six Nations (for me anyway) and the song "As long as we beat the English" rings around the Valleys.
     
    Anyone else here as excited? This year I'm going to watch more Guiness Premiership rugby on Sky as well as the Magners on BBC2 and S4C.
     
    Ohhhhh bring it on.....
     
    Gareth
  10. garethEds
    So the first week started on Tuesday - no pupils. I haven't been in all Summer but results were delivered to me via email.
     
    This is where we are... (split into job titles)
     
    Head of ICT

    Analyse results
    GCSE - done
    ALevel - done
    AS Level - done
    Year 9 Key Skills - done
    Write my department self-eval for last year (not done)
    Write my development plan for this year (not done)
    Photocopy resources for the beginning of each year group module (all done except Year 13)
    Met Year 12 pupils on Thursday to see who wants to take Applied ICT this year - 12 turn up wanting to take the course. I'm chuffed.
    Met Year 13 to discuss who will be dropping the course due to low grades or as their 4th A-Level.
    Meet department staff
    Meet line manager to discuss results
    Meet headteacher for a chat about results
    ICT Coordinator

    Tuesday morning - Train staff in the use of the new LEA learning portal - make sure all the accounts are consolidated.
    Chase up any staff who didn't make it to the training for varying reasons.
    Start moving the old website over the new Sharepoint template (CMS). Work in progress can be seen here: https://swansea-edunet.gov.uk/en/schools/gwyr/Pages/Default.aspx
    Chase up Moodle with the LEA as Shibboleth is not working. They are upgrading. Fair play it was fixed before the pupils got back today.
    Answer questions about SIMS which is an issue. Again LEA are fixing it - problems due to an SQL upgrade which went wrong.
    Sort out our Lisol Assessment server so they can start migrating the data over to SIMS and our new assessment manager.
    Answer a variety of questions about training.
    Network Manager

    Realise RIS server is broken so think sod it and start building a WDS server cos I think it will be good experience to learn how it works. All works except for naming machines like RIS used to do in the custom install.
    Chase technician to see if he did the work over the Summer.
    Chase LEA with various stuff.
    I'm not moaning - it's very busy and enjoy the hussle but I think it's time to get rid of the Network Manager stuff and make sure the department is running strong (it is - but can always be better).
     
    Technician is run off his feet doing work in the science block which has been re-wired so I'm trying to help there as well.
     
    OH well - welcome back everyone. Have a good year.
     
    Gareth
  11. garethEds
    I've thought about writing a blog here since I arrived a few months ago - but I didn't think people really would wwant to read it.
     
    Anyway, I thought tough, I'm going to write it anyway and ramble my way through what happens in our school and what I do as a Head of ICT, a Network Manager and ICT Coordinator.
     
    I may moan, I may whinge. I may waffle and edit my posts, but hopefully someone will find it interesting. If not, tell me to shut up and I will stop LOLOL.
     
    If anyone has anythning they would like me to talk about in my school I will do so (within reason) LOL. But I do hope to waffle on about:
     
    So welcome to the 'Ramblings of the Confused Job Title'
     
    GJE
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