kingswood

My friend Shane has mentioned that he found our comments highly offensive. For the sake of sanity, I withdraw my comments made light-heartedly and apologise. Paul

Hi Ric. Sorry I couldn't be of more help! Yes- I think the features were added from 12.1 onwards. Have you tried the command as follows? ip address dhcp [client-id interface name] [hostname host-name] I think this method has to use the 12.1 and onwards IOS (possibly 12.2(3)), and can be used on interfaces that connect directly to and ISP. As you'll know this lets you do clever stuff like PAT so that you can let private inetrnal addresses get to the internet. Just as an aside, a lot of it depends on your DHCP server (i.e. the router using pass-through). The command can be changed to: ip address dhcp client-id ethernet 1 (etc) ip address dhcp hostname ip address dhcp client-id ethernet 0/0 I really hope you get it working- all the best!! Paul

Hi. I thought a command like: ip address dhcp on your interface would suffice...but my memory may not serve me right here. So you would change to your requried interface: Interface ethernet0 (or whatever it is) ip address dhcp I think this would be unusual for a router though- normally you would want to assign a static IP address to your router interfaces- or even make your router a DHCP server. Hope that helps! Paul

Hell- please don't let Shane be a moderator.... Can you say "anarchy"? Paul

At Kingswood we have historically used Ghost, but I have recently been using RIS to really good effect. This has been a Godsend really since ghost has let me down, and I haven't had the time to troubleshoot to any depth. Can't wait to see what XImage will be like in Vista- hopefully M$ have made some progress... Paul

OK. But that's an existential argument only. In reality Network Managers have so little time to go around reinventing "better wheels...with tyre treads that allow you to drive better in the rain without skidding or slipping" that using wheels already in existence PROVEN TO WORK can mean the difference between productive use of time and a complete waste of time. How long would it take you to "reinvent" this wheel then? A week? In the meantime I just download the one that works and get the thing done. For everyone else: I have been using a veritable book of proverbial wheels for my reading material this last week- "Windows 2003 Server Cookbook", and would highly recommend the material to you all. Paul

I think you all have excellent points (and gripes). As an Apple lover (they are good for your health you know) I can note the failings of Server 2003 and say, "if we had a Tiger Server..." but in the end we would have our own problems even with that solution (albeit not as cumbersome). What is worse than Server's failings here, are the "solutions" that supposedly make using the thing in schools "easier". You know them- RM, Viglen, and in our case, CSE. They "do" tack on glossy interfaces for basic tasks, target those interfaces at people who know nothing better, and then when those tools break or don't work they sit back and rake in "engineering" time to fix them. As someone said, it's all a money making sham. And it makes our jobs so hard at times. Printers are a *perfect* example of this: trying to get a script to apply that will assign printers to rooms using a GPO this week has cause me major headaches. Why HAVE M$ made this so freakin hard?? Windows Server 2003 R2? I thought this would just add some new features and include SP1 etc? If it does add new features, what will be the cost of "upgrading" to this release.... Paul

Yep- the same here really. How much of it do they use? About a fifth... Paul

Hi. Use PSShutdown from Sysinternals- an excellent tool. You can find it here: http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PsShutdown.html Why reinvent the wheel? Paul :-)

Historically our school has bought built to order CSE servers- until I started working there. We have since shifted to Dell PowerEdge servers and never had a problem at all. As others have mentioned, HP are a good make too- what you should normally think of is support structure (that's why we don't buy off CSE anymore ;-) Paul

Didn't catch this one before now, but the tutorials that come with Flash are pretty good primers to using the product. I used the "Flash Bible" to learn a lot of the other things. Have fun! Paul

We deploy Office via MSI in a GPO and it works great. I used an administrative install so that the volume license code and needed components were there, and it works great. Good luck! Paul

Yep- I know that. But the teaching staff wanted their "inter--raa--nettt" NOW. Sp I gave them one. We are actually testing at the moment MS Sharepoint services. Like I said- it's a very quick and easy solution to get you going. I haven't got the time (or the inclination) to sit down and hand code the thing or even to design pretty pages using Dreamweaver etc. It works. That makes me happy :-) Paul

I used Apache running on a secondary admin server. Runs fine. What I have started doing is using simple tools like Publisher to get a calendar and news items on the pages for staff only (right now) and a list of internal email addresses I configured using Server's mail software. Simple but effective. Paul

I tend to agree with Mark here- even with the GPO set not to enable offline files, we still have problems with machines that insist on synchronising with the server. In the past this has caused a corrupt profile. What we do is disable the feature on the local machine, and that tends to help. Mind you- this is only on some of the machines. Many of them obey the dictates of the Group Policy system. Not sure why... Paul

We can't not come- our school is in the same town :-P Looking forward to it- kudos to Lodge Park for offering their facilities in this way. "The First Annual EduGeek Conference". Could sound good ya know! Paul

Yep- told him that at work :-) In fact, I showed him. But he seemed to remember Macs having a more "wheel like" spin to the dock experience. I came to Mac OS at Jaguar, so they may have done this before that release. Anyone else know if this is the case? Paul

Yes- "buy 15,000 mouse mats and get ONE free!" Yay. :-( Paul

Thanks guys. What about migrating Windows 2000 AD information to a 2003 Server? I have *heard* that it works, but obviously this is a bit worrying... Thanks, Paul

Hi. Well, we have just spent two days this week with our friendly CSE engineer getting a new server joined to our existing domain, migrating user accounts from one server to another and installing other bits and pieces. Today, we entered what I call a "nightmare scenario"- the migration and replication didn't work well at all and we have been left fighting fires all day long as one support issue after another cropped up. Since CSE is a managed system and the school have been with them for 10 years(!), I thought we would get pretty good service from them. But their tools aren't working, we're getting really basic VB6 errors on trying to use the tool-set, and even after calling CSE are no further along. OK. So, I have no problem installing a server myself- in fact we had it all running before we opted for CSE to come in. And it ran pretty well. Issues with split-site DHCP and DNS became too cumbersome and so we went with CSE and joined the two together as one domain. My question is - how easy is it to migrate all of our user areas, passwords, user accounts etc over to a new server? I want to "test" the migration first (a la ADMT) to see how we would get on, but if any of you have any pointers or pitfalls please make me aware of them before I do this. Obviously this is a drastic step at this stage of the year, but the system really is falling and we can't afford another CSE call-out and "support" costs. Anyone had experience of ADMT or know of articles about it we could look at and try out first before committing?? Thanks a million!!! Paul

We also use Bluepoint for a lot of our stuff and they seem fine. For more techie items we tend to order from Misco- it's been that way for a long time apparently. But no complaints about Bluepoint here either... Paul

I know this was primarily addressed at Tony- and he's got a lot more experience with Macs than I, but I installed Tiger server at the weekend and intend to configure it this coming week sometime. The install was very easy (as you would expect from Apple). Let's hope the rest of it is :-) Hope it works for you! Paul

Hi ChrisH. When you say that your computer is "managed", do you mean that you have prestaged it within AD? Would you mind posting a copy of your RISETUP file so that we can have a look? Even if the machine hasn't picked up this information via your setup file, you should be able to join the domain manually by the usual method. I mean- (silly question I know)- have you checked your IP address and NIC driver status etc? Hope it works out for you! Paul

Hi Mark. We had an admin network IP range that only allowed for 124 clients (and after using most for printers and servers etc effectively had a lot less than that to use). EMBC (our broadband provider) wouldn't give us anymore but recommended that we use a small NAT device from NetGear (or whoever else we wanted to get one from) and take one of our 124 addresses and assign that to the WAN port. We could then use any private range we like internally to give as many addresses as we needed to internal systems and other devices. I used 192.168.x.x and we can now have up to 254 clients with static IP addresses- whilst using only one of our 124 routable public addresses. Neat. And it works really well! We currently have about 150 admin systems running through the NAT box at any one time- remembering of course they only do this when they want an external (internet) connection. It's pretty fast too. To help, I connected the NAT box directly into our core switch, so that helps a little. As from next week however, we are going to reaching nearly 220 connections to the NAT box, so time will tell whether this is a workable solution. Apparently EMBC know of many schools with this arrangement and they use the following model or a derivative of it: http://www.netgear.co.uk/firewall_router_8_vpn_tunnels.php All I can say is, "it works". And well enough for admin use. If you have many more intended connections through the NAT box, i.e. curriculum internet use, then you will need a bit more serious equipment. Hopefully this answer will help you a little though. If you decide it will fit the bill and you need any more help let me know and I'll be only too happy to help you out. Take care, Paul

We bought a small NAT box so that we could extend our allotted IP addresses given us from .ICT/EMBC for our admin systems. The box recommended to us was a NetGear (can't think right now what model)- really easy to set up and works a treat. Cheap and cheerful, but good nevertheless. If you want the model number or anything let me know and I'll dig it out and provide links etc. Paul