ICTNUT

@ChrisH: I did used to use nLite for cd based installs and it worked great but I have never been able to get to work properly with an RIS based image. Currently we have 12 apps being installed silently and automatically, including serial numbers and the like, for out ICT rooms. Average time for a complete install of an ICT room PC varies between 35mins to 60mins depending on the number of PC's also being imaged in the same room. Also a side note: By removing components using third party applications such as nLite you maybe, and probobly are, violating the EULA for Microsoft Windows.

@Kingswood: I Will Post up the scripts used on Monday for you as I do not have them with me at the moment.

Hi All, We have just dumped Ghost for RIS however came across a problem, we could not use riprep as we have a wide flavour of PC's so we have put together the following: A base stock image (XPSP2) Depending on the installation type required (XPSP2, XPSP2 with Office, XPSP2 For ICT Room 12 apps in total etc.) we created a custom .sif file for each scenario Depending on the selection made RIS would run the relevant .sif file and within it we would have an entry for GUIRUNONCE which would execute a .cmd file which would then add entries into the registry under the RunOnceEX option. The steps that are followed by RIS are: 1 - Base install of XPSP2 2 - Once the base install was finished RunOnceEx registry entries are added and pc rebooted 3 - Upon restart the PC would auto login and run the RunOnceEx entries in order and install required software from a central install share. We have also used the following method to intergrate over 2500 drivers covering LAN, AUDIO, VGA, WLAN, CHIPSET into the base install so there is no longer a requirement to worry about drivers for the various flavours of PC we have. Friday, just gone, we RIS'd 60 PC's simultaniously, took 1hr 40mins and only 2 failed not bad I think. If anyone would like a copy of the scripts used to automate this process simply shout.....

I did try to remove the account and try again but this had no change. What I may do is pre stage the PC within AD and see if that helps but in all fairness I should not have to do that. Any other Ideas?? Yes you should if you want it to be a managed PC from the off. What user credentials are contained in the .SIF file to join the PC to the domain too?

Hi all, I have a funny problem here and wonder if any of you guys who RIS images have come across it. I have two types of image: 1 - Stock XP SP2 images with some tweaks to run program setups via RunOnceEx 2 - XP SP2 Master Image I have recently taken delivery of 45 new Dell PC's and have started to image these using option 1 above with no problems. I then decided to reimage one of the old IT suites that we have however once DHCP has been obtained and the Client Install Wizard is displayed I login using the same creds as if I was doing one of the new machines choose option 2 (master Images) am the prompted that all data will be lost due to format, hit enter, and then get 00004e4f.osc: Currently logged-in user does not have the appropriate rights to create or modify a computer account in Active Directory. I know this is not the case as it has not problems adding brand new pc's that have never been on the network, this only seems to happen to machines that are already in use. I am rolling out RIS in favour of Ghost (<-- this never really worked) so any help would be great.

We had the same issue at our place, SIMS was taking a good awful long time to upgrade. In the end we called in one of the SIMS support team from County who pointed out that the McAffee ePO AV (version 8) that we use causes no end of problems with SIMS. Seeing as both SIMS and the AV are provided to us via county and that the AV policies are controlled by county it would appear that they do not speak to each other. Anyhow we know have to stop the framework (McAffee) services and then run the upgrade at which point it flies through without an issue.

I was going to say that the advanced proxy mod as it stands at the moment can do IP ranges as I use it all the time to kill the internet in the library at lunch times. One thing I am really impressed with and few people mention is the cache ability, compared to ISA 2000 (not sure about ISA 2004) the average cache lasted around six unique requests, I know this can be altered but never really had much affect on bandwidth usage, however since putting in Smoothwall + Mods and having it running for about a month it has cut bandwidth usage by over one third. This has been accomplsihed by caching the pages correctly and utilising the blocklist available at urlblacklist.com to remove 90% of ads from pages. It just gets better the more I use it ;-)

Hi Overworked, I have done just that ! I got rid of ISA 2000/Windows 2000 in favour of Smoothwall 2.0 (Open Source) and DansGuardian Content Filter with Advanced Proxy 2.0 I have been so impressed with it at blocking stuff right down to specific words in pages themselves. To get the best out of it I would suggest you really get into all the areas of the web based GUI frontend as there is so much that you can configure. I am looking into the QoS addon which if it works the way I hope will be perfect for our VoIP and Video Confrencing. Shout me if you need any help ;-)

GrumbleDook: I knew it was somewhere, Friday afternoon brain ache. Cheers all problem sorted ;-)

ChrisH: Where are you doing this??

@ChrisH: Mutli selecting all users and the selecting properties allows you to global add to a group but not remove them. Unless....... BRB [edit] Nope, I thought that if you selected a group and then selected the add group option it would remove the current groups and re-add the selected ones but it does not. [/edit]

@Dos_Box: Off the top of your head can you remember where, we run Win2k3 servers here but for the life of me I can't find it anywhere. BTW: He no longer has access to any of the servers :-)

Hi All, Anyone got any idea how to remove group membership from 1700 users in one go. My new ICT Techie decided it would be fun to add all students to the domain admins group. Don't ask !!!!

I second Ric_'s post untill recently, when I got shot of ISA totally, It would do exactly the same where the proxy would just stop responding for no reason and no errors either. After a bit of digging I ensured that the External NIC was set to secondary and the Internal NIC was primary, This did solve the problem for a bit but then I found that the proxy would stop responding again if the overall load on it was getting high the proxy would stop. Not syaing this is your problem but just thought it was worth a mention.

Mark Said: I have the naughtyness level set to 95, goolge image search forced to use safe=strict via a url re-write, and the blacklist available from urlblacklist.com. Using the above and a few extra mods found at the smoothwall community the level of AUP violations by both students and teachers has dropped right off. Peter Said: Of course you are correct however school proxies should have these ports closed and/or filtered, although saying that you can not be too sure that the central proxy provided by your county will have them closed or even monitored so we took the steps of blocking all stuff like P2P and bit-torrent at our firewall level. This was done by using a combination of port blocking, packet/bandwidth shaping, throtelling outgoing bandwidth also the fact that students are unable to install anything on the workstations pretty much eliminates this issue.

I have just chucked out our ISA2000/N2H2 Filtering and replaced it with: Smoothwall 2.0 Dansguardian Clam Anti Virus Advanced Proxy Filter Advanced URL Filter and as a result NOTHING (well almost) gets through, it has made my life SOOOOOO much easier in this area. Best of all its free and only took 2-3 hours to get up and running 1 day to fully configure and 1 week of solid out of hours testing. {edit} did i mention the fully featured web frontend to the whole thing {/edit}

@Ric_ A full tank for around £20 when petrol would cost £60 it pays for itself did cost £1200 to put it in though.

Mine is a Jeep Cherokee Sport 2.4 v6 Petrol/LPG <-- Believe me if you have one of these the first thing you do is convert it ;-)

This sounds promising: Q. How do I restrict users in a domain environment? A. Although the User Restrictions tool can be used to restrict local user accounts, Active Directory provides more powerful tools to restrict users and configure the computer. The toolkit includes a Group Policy template that you can use to implement user restrictions applied by the User Restrictions tool. I think I might have a play with this over the next few days

I Have had the same set of problems but I went the whole hog and disabled the right click context menu in IE. This was ok for a while until the blighters found that if you go into My Docs -> My Pics then double click on a picture this opens M$'s wonder Picture and Fax viewer which if you right click the image, guess what, "Save as Desktop Backgound" I have hunted high and low and to date can not find a way of disabling it regardless of GPO. So at the moment to get around it I use the following at user Logon: ' Script to change desktops back to the original corp/school image. ' ' This script runs each time the user logs onto the machine and resets the desktop. ' ' Author: Ozan Pakyuz, 16-09-2005 Option Explicit Dim RegKey, WshShell, FSO ' Declare variables and enumerate existing printer connections Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") ' Step 1 Delete The Key WshShell.RegDelete "HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\Wallpaper" WshShell.RegDelete "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\Wallpaper" 'Debug Line MsgBox "Key Has Been Deleted" ' Step 2 Add the new key WshShell.RegWrite "HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\Wallpaper","C:\Windows\image.BMP","REG_SZ" WshShell.RegWrite "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\Wallpaper","C:\Windows\image.BMP","REG_SZ" ' Debug Line MsgBox "Key Has Been Added" ' Step 3 Copy the background over (1024*768) If FSO.FileExists("c:\Windows\imae.BMP") Then FSO.DeleteFile "C:\Windows\image.BMP" FSO.CopyFile "\\UNC Path to image file\imgae.bmp", "c:\Windows\" Else FSO.CopyFile "\\UNC Path to image file\imgae.bmp", "c:\Windows\" End If Now you can either call this from your logon.bat file or like I do apply via GPO as Logon Script. This seems to have done the trick so far by replacing the users desktop backgrounds and replacing the logon screen background to so even when no user is logged in you still get the desktop visible. Enjoy

We use Print Manager Plus, the kids don't really see it in action as most of them rarely hit the limits imposed however the teachers hate it with a vengance

Thanks Geoff, I'll take a look at lunch time and see If i can see anything.

@E1uSiV3: We have used this product since 99/00 and as far as I can remeber NOT had any upgrades for it other than the block list updates that come down via the web. So as far as I am concerned the information is STILL being pumped out, regardless if they are still harvesting or not, and I have no way of stopping it other than removing it from the servers.

@Geoff: I am putting together a smoothwall + dansguardian + clamAV solution. As yet there has been no word from anyone at either N2H2 or Secure Computing <-- New owners !

@Ric_: It was supplied to us by our county, I have spoken to them this morning and they say they had no idea. They had also just purchased a county wide upgrade to the new SmartFilter/Bess software which is in essence N2H2 re-badged. I am looking into alternatives now but it just sickens me that a compnay would abuse it's position in this way