kingswood

Hey Tony. You've done well sir! It'll be good to read your experienced contributions. On a connected note: why didn't Lodge Park snap Andrew up??? 8O Take care, Paul

The GIMP is a great piece of software Paul

Hi Tony. Down the road where? But yes- sounds good. Unfortunately, the expert that is Andrew won't be joining us, and that's our loss I think. I'm not new to server installations but certainly new to school server installations...seems very different kettle of fish to me. Email me if you like and we'll chat and organise something (once I know where exactly you are :? ) Take care, Paul

Great stuff Mark- I kept thinking about this today too after reading the question here. Thanks!! Paul

Hi Mark. Yep- perhaps we should move this to another section I think Ric made some great points and I've spent the latter part of tonight looking into this some more. I think you asked a good question too- are there any pitfalls in not using roaming profiles? To be totally honest, I think it's a case of horses for courses. On our upper site we use CSE Systems and they manage our network's software configuration (mostly). They use local profiles with redirected My Documents. It's quite complex, and logon times vary depending on traffic but probably average at three minutes. Would roaming profiles help here? I doubt it, although we could redirect Application Data and see some kind of small improvement. What I think happens is that with locally stored profiles you get to the point where you are worrying about disk management anyway, so you may as well centralise this and "anchor" all this stuff on the server, where you might have more space or could use quotas etc. Remember, the files and folders in "C:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\Local Settings" (a hidden folder) don't roam, and these tend to be the beasts in the picture- not only internet temporary files but application temp files as well. Store these locally (and after one month my own is at 2GB) and after a term you can what would happen! In a nutshell there are pros and cons to both methods of profiling. Ric has given me much food for thought (thanks Ric) as have all other contributors. The good thing is, we all learn. And I have. If in the future traffic becomes a problem, I could always switch to running local profiles and redirected folders. I think it would be fair to say that I will know after at least the first term back Cheers all- I'm enjoying this discussion hugely!! Paul

Hi Ric. You have a good point- it might seem that this much traffic makes a difference and ultimately it *may* do so. Hard drive space on the server isn't a problem for us (hence the choice of profiles to use) because we have a shiny new Dell PE 2800 with three 160GB SCSI hard drives (probably too much space mind you!). Looking at Microsoft estimates of average traffic generated during a single XP logon to a 2000 server (roughly 1MB), I can see your point about logons taking ages to come across the LAN. I'm not in any way knocking what you are saying :oops: What I am planning on doing is knocking out the transfer of IE temp files (which cause a lot of traffic during logon/logoff) and taking the advice to heart about deleting locally cached copies of profiles on logoff. But seriously, if you think that in reality this isn't workable I am VERY open to suggestions. Can I ask how you cope with this- do you use local profiles with redirected folders etc? Thanks for your help and advice. Paul

Because (traditionally) profiles had My Documents and other folders connected with them, bringing down lots (hundreds) of profiles and their encumbent saved files etc was a real pain (thinking back to NT4 here). If you think of both methods for a moment, it seems to me that if user A has 300MB of profile data in their profile on logoff using NT and another the same amount using XP, all the data (300MB of it) on the NT machine is saved back to the server; however on the XP machine only files changed since logon are saved back to the folder. If you are using roaming profiles and the user pretty much stays on one machine all day every day, this is OK. An XP machine will just send back to the profile changed data files, and this might not amount to much. But if the user genuinely "roams" this isn't so good- because the first time they log on to a new machine their whole profile is downloaded to their machine. I understand this can be a bind (and a worry). But from my experience (and I may be wrong here) using intellimirror services such as redirected folders makes roaming profiles a lot more manageable. For example, just enabling redirected folders for user B above would mean that they can logon at any station and not have their My Documents folder brought down with their profile. Because students are made to save to My Documents and can't tinker with other windows settings, and because Application Data is also redirected this *seems* to stop a huge logon time at a new machine. In other words (if I'm not making sense) user B in my example above saves their files to My Documents, which is anchored at the server (a fixed location) giving the impression that they can roam from station to station and have access to their files when they do so, but leaving the contents of My Docs on the server (which is better for security and backups etc). I've tested this and it appears to work well, but if you have any points I'll listen Paul

Many thanks for the responses! Having come from industry, schools seem very different politically- in terms of IT budget, who gets to commit that budget etc etc. In Kingswood we will have a Systems' Manager and a Network Manager as well as a Technician under both. So I suppose there is some kind of "chain" there! lol! But yes- I'm up for this. I'm installing the new Dell PowerEdge server for the school today, and imaging systems next week ready for testing (using RIS/RIPREP). Currently the school uses a managed solution (CSE Systems), but because we are merging with another school I am planning on using the new site (we will be split site) to test roaming profiles, redirected folders, and an "unmanaged" solution. I will bear in mind the issues raised- in fact I have copied the messages so that I can make sure I start pressing them in several directions. This is a great forum by the way!! Very addictive Thanks again for all the help, Paul

...a network manager? I have been offered a great opportunity to become our school's network manager, and although I have signed up and committed to it (and will enjoy it), what can I expect from the position? What does it mean when you are told you are the "network manager"? Anyone got any ideas on what the position involves, or do schools seem to give the title but not the position If you want you can email me your response- that way I can give a more personal explanation of where I am going with this question. Either way, all stories, help, and warnings are appreciated! Paul

True. But it works. And it IS only £20...... Paul

Here ya go: http://www.bulkimport.co.uk/

Hi. I'm a Mac user (there- I said it). And we are introducing a Tiger Server and about 10 clients (at the moment) into our existing AD network. Testing logons using a simple LDAP/AD bind process (using the Directory Access tool found in Utilities on any Mac) you can pretty much get your users authenticating with their *usual* accounts. If you want, you can map drives and all sorts but for that you tend to have to use (a) an expensive third party product like ADmitMac; or (b) buy a Tiger Server and extend your AD schema to allow you some management over users who will logon to your Mac systems. With Tiger (the latest OS release) things have gotten better. When I log in using my iBook to the AD as a normal user I can see my redirected "My Docs" and save work there etc. You could simply use User Manager on your Apple Server to lock things down a bit more. It's more complex than that, but worth it (I would say that- lol). Best place to go is the Apple UK website and look for Server documentation, making User Management and Open Directory guides your favourite ones for a month or so. Hope that helps- if not, help me understand what you need and I'll have a think about it. Paul

Hi. New here, so go easy RIS actually works with a service called SISG (Single Instance Storage Groveller) and this means that you can have several "images" of XP on your RIS partition (and it should be on a separate partition from your boot/system one, preferably a separate physical disk) but that service will search those images and figure out when those multiple images are using the exact same file and keep only one copy of that file in a separate location, using instead of duplicate files a pointer to it from each copy it finds! This is where you should see significant disk space savings over keeping several ghost images on your server. With Ghost images (and we use these too but are moving to RIS/RIPREP), you don't get this. So, on our new server we have an RIS volume and within this at the most three images. The SISG service reduces the size of these by marking out files that are identical and pointing to one file of that type. With Ghost you would have three separate images. Why can't you use RIS on a system partition? Well, if you think, it "grovels" those similar files and makes a pointer to only one and shares that file out..what would happen on your system drive? Wouldn't like to say 8O In all I think RIS is a great service (and free) so thanks for the articles and pointers. Hopefully this has helped someone! lol! Paul