Teth

Necro I know but I'm having trouble getting this running. I'm trying to put this on the same machine I have WSUS on so I made a new site in IIS7 rather than trying to use the default site. I'm following the instructions in the updater 2.0 Technote pdf that came with it but when I add the httpHandlers IIS starts complaining my web.config is invalid. Can any one spot what's wrong or post a working config for comparison? EDIT: I figured it out from some web.config examples I found online. needs to be under which probably doesn't exist in a new site file. Config file below in case anyone needs it.

Simple question really. In the days of NT4.0 we did 1 share for each user folder. In my last change of storage architecture I had yeargroups split across servers 1 share per year group. Now I'm moving to a new NAS with an SSD cache layer for user folders and all my users will be on a single clustered NAS end point. I could just create 1 "//my_nas/home" share. I'm confident that windows 7 folder remapping will be happy with this solution and I can used mapped network drives to their folders for old apps. Has anyone done or read anything related recently. Is there any problem I'm not seeing or advantage to the old 1 user 1 share approach?

We're looking at EES and I've been reading the MS info on the license terms and some of the threads here but haven't seen this come up. It is all down to Full time equivalent staff who use a desktop. Now we have 2 networks here an externally managed one that we have to have a certain amount of machines on and it's used by admin and all staff, we also have our own network which is used only by Teaching staff and students. Has anyone else looked into this kind of setup. The managed machines have licenses independent of the EES license we are considering taking for the machines on our own network. Would licensing based on number of full time employees who will have an account on and use that network?

Had another look at this in the afternoon finally. I did WDSUTIL /Delete-AutoAddDevices /DeviceType:ApprovedDevices and got the error that "No Auto Add devices matched the specified criteria" thinking that a bit weird given that I've built more than 200 machines from this WDS server in the last month I tried the RejectedDevices and PendingDevices parameters too. This would seem to indicate there are no records in my Auto-Add database at all. Of course building this desktop again results in it aquiring a computer name automatically rather than prompting for the administrator to assign it. This time however it has picked up a different name of an existing machine on the network. Starting to think all is not well with my WDS server.

I'm happy enough to clear the database at this point I think. Wouldn't be a huge headache to prestage the machines for next rebuild. Their next build will probably be Win7 which will be major work anyway. I rebuilt it again last night before I left work after flushing caches etc and this morning it is sitting rebuilt as a clone of an existing machine "duplicate network name detected" so it's really not going to do any harm there is obviously something screwy

This is one of those problems I'm sure somone has had and answered but I can't find it on google because it's too hard to describe. I have a 2 DC 2 file server network with 250ish XP clients. We moved from our old building to our new school recently and took our PCs and servers with us. The new building is a different size and shape so rather than moving PCs room to room we just stacked PCs by model type and filled suites with apropriate numbers of machines. We deleted all machine accounts from AD and then proceeded to build the machines from WDS on a server 2k3 R2 server with the "For unknown clients notify admin and respond after approval" setting. We named 99% of the machines this way and it was all flawless... except 1 machine. 1 Dell 745 Low profile system does not request admin approval it instead rebuilds from WDS with its old computer name. I've searched AD for objects with the same name looked through all the OUs and there is no entry for this machine in AD but yet WDS is rebuilding it each time... Where could WDS be finding this computer account info? and how do I kill it?

It's a bigscreen iphone so basically you have a web browser, ipod music and video player and whatever apps you get on the store. The OS is well hardened so lockdown isn't an issue however it is also simplistic and there seem to be allot of problems with DHCP, DNS and proxy servers when used on any network more complicated than a ADSL / Cable modem + wireless router setup. So from a technical standpoint they are on shakey ground in schools. From an educational standpoint all they have going for them is a web browser with no storage or printing facilities so of limited use for research. Unless some educational software is approved by apple and released on the istore I don't see them having any practical use in schools. If such software existed it would also need to be bought once for every ipad + the cost of a class set of ipads makes me find it hard to believe any such app wouldn't have a much cheaper alternative. I think netbooks or a linux or windows based Slates are a much better investment. HP and acer have interesting Slate devices coming if you are looking for something with an alternative interface which is more tactile for youngsters.

I know it's not the opinion your looking for but I'm going to be another voice for finding the money or cutting your license bill I'll explain my background and why. Background: I'm the senior of 2 IT techs at a 1,200 pupil grammar school. We run a network a little larger than yours 360 desktops and 140ish laptop 80 of which are set up to roam in and out of school as teacher laptops. We have flirted with the idea of going open source but have remained a hybrid site. 2x Win2k3 R2 DCs Win2k3 R2 print and WSUS server Win2k3 R2 Sims server Linux firewall / proxy / filter Linux web server Linux file server Linux NAS backups. Laptop clients are windows XP, Desktops are winXP locally installed with an ubuntu network boot option. We buy our licenses outright when we buy machines. Many say this is more expensive in the longrun which would be true if you paid for updates for every version but we refresh IT suites around every 5-7 years and have stayed on XP clients with office 2003. Adobe CS we license every other of every 3 versions on average and buy a site licence. This saves us considerably on overall licensing costs with minimal impact on teaching & learning. We have had the dual boot option to ubuntu for 2 years now. It is set up so that users login with their domain credentials and get their home folder and printers mapped the same as they would with windows. Teachers were instructed by senior management to learn the system and have been given staff development goals to run lessons on the Ubuntu clients. The initial view when starting Linux implementation was to go entirely open source. However as the trial has gone on the impracticality of it has become more and more obvious. The linux system boots fast and is very reliable so quick internet lessons etc routinely use Ubuntu as the kids in many cases prefer it. However CLAIT examinations and prep have to be windows at this stage. The examination software is windows only and the marking software only properly supports office files created by MS office. MS access is a unique product I have found no real OSS equivalent so when it comes to database theory there is again a dual boot to windows required. Our move to Linux at the backend has been massively successful however. File servers performance has increased on the same hardware. Internal web server and internet access are incredibly reliable and all for the cost of the hardware and no continued licensing. Integration with our small room of apple imacs was also very straightforward with the open standards Linux backend. Now from reading the above you might think we're so close here we might as well change exam boards to release us from MS office and make the switch and embrace the massive savings of open source.. The thing is however having run like this and compiled the spreadsheets etc it isn't that straight forward. Time is the enemy with the Linux side. After 3 years of backend and 2 years of client linux use I like to think I'm getting pretty good with Linux. I'm entirely self taught from forums like edugeek and of course google. It has swallowed time. We're a 2 man IT department and my time on the Linux side fault finding, writing scripts for EVERYTHING and the constant tweaking required with suposedly automated patches and security updates has meant a huge increase in workload on our other technician when I'm busy with the Linux system. The Linux system has also been down for extended periods ( a few days at a time). Long term I've learned from these and I could now avoid them but there is no help out there unless you are prepared to pay huge money which makes your MS licensing look like a pittance, no one will come in and make your linux network just work after a failure. You really will be on your own as an institution. In these situations we have been able to say "no linux system today please use windows boot option, Sorry". Without our windows system to fall back on we'd have seen massive disruption to teaching & learning and administration. To quote our head "Unacceptable dissruption" and for that reason alone we have not made the move to OSS entirely. To me this is the bottom line point for OSS. The money savings look great on paper. You get rid of the set costs of Licensing. You however get a whole new raft of variable costs. We replaced 60 network cards in 2 suites that were not Linux compatible to make our dual boot system available there. The school has paid me countless hours of overtime into evenings and weekends since we switched to sort out problems. If I were to leave this job now I would be in a brilliant position to get a new and better paying job elsewhere with the skills I have acquired and conversely the school would I imagine find it hard to impossible to hire someone capable of maintaining never mind adding to our system for the 20k a year they are paying me. We have used exceptional closure days for staff training and I'm sure hours of productive time have been lost in classes adjusting staff and pupils to a new way of working. I would argue however that as long as it doesn't interfere with assesment and results learning new skills outside of the MS space is a good for them. We've lost allot of time due to downtime as well which has a cost. Windows is generally well documented, well QA tested, and well supported by vendors of 3rd party apps and hardware. That has a financial benefit even if it is hard to put on a balance sheet. If I were you I would look into running an OSS solution especially for backend cost cutting. Longterm you can head that way in the classroom too but from my experience I would say a straight switch is professional suicide unless you have a much larger support and development team than I do here. If that were the case then as I mentioned above there are allot of licenses in the 20kish salary of a windows trained technician. I myself have been and will continue to work toward gettign a payrise because at this point I could be getting paid much better for less work elsewhere and the senior staff here are really starting to appreciate that having interviewed to add a 3rd technician recently. The position wasn't filled as no candidates demonstrated sufficient skills for the job. It will be re-advertised at a higher grade which is again a cost. Good luck with your project you certainly have interesting times ahead. Whatever you end up doing Edugeeks will be here to help like they were for me

I'm looking for a little info on pricing of Net support manager 10. I'm not looking for anyone to share actual quotes etc but my hands are quite tied with who I'm allowed to buy software from and I want to check that I'm getting our school value for money. We currently have 150 license of net support School 8. I'm upgrading to 150 license of Net support manager 10. I've been quoted NSS school 8 to 10 Upgrade £7.89 *150 License = £1184.62 NSS School to Manager upgrade £8.50 *150 License = £1275.75 Annual Maintenance = £729 Total £3189 This includes a stated 25% discount. I'm not asking for numbers just an indication from anyone else who has licensed on a similar scale how this compared with other resellers.

I'm not convinced that with XP infinite syspreping is a good idea. I use a default image with the basics that every machine receives windows, drivers, couple of system software bits, current windows updates as of when the image was created and CS3 because deploying it by GPO took 3 times longer than including the same data in the image. I update the image roughly twice a year but in the 3 years I've been working here I've had to start from scratch a couple of times with most of the images because they became "broken" with multiple syspreps. Not the same exact problem each time but one image developed an issue that made it impossible to connect to WMI on any machine based on it. Another one developed a logon issue for users which repeatedly prevented roaming profiles applying. I did allot of hunting to find exactly what was wrong with them but in the end I remade the image from a clean XP SP3 disc and everything was great.

Yea this comes down to types of fragmentation and the use of the drive. Not all fragmentation is a problem. NTFS, EXT3+, Reiser, HFS all handle fragmentation well if left with 15-30% free space headroom. Fragmentation is a single logical file stored in multiple non contiguous blocks and sectors on the physical disc. A modern file system like those listed above will always try to place a newly saved file in a continuous run of blocks. It is much faster to both read and write from a drive if the heads don't have to move. The only time these file systems will fragment if kept above 30% free space is very large files and this isn't necessarily a problem. If a 700MB disc image gets split into 2, 5 or 10 sections it really doesn't matter. That will be read 200 blocks move hea,d read 200 more, repeat 3 more times. Its only when the seek to read ratio reaches a certain point that performance actually suffers. There are of course like everything there are exceptions. A fragmented page file will badly hurt a machine's performance. Better defrag tools like diskkeeper and Norton defrag will arrange more frequently used files toward the center of the disk were seek times are faster due to the smaller circumfrence of the platter at that point so there are advantages to defragging. In short. Daily defrag is causing disc wear for no real gain and your wasting time. Never defragging is a bad idea too. I defrag machines after a build or any significant alteration of software and between terms. File servers I defrag every friday after school before backups. Always scandisk before defragging. You don't want a defrag program moving data from good sectors into bad sectors which were not know and causing data loss.

Your folders need read access for everyone. If your installing by GPO the PCs will be processing the GPO before anyone logs in so the instalation packages need to be accessible to the workstation. I dunno if a workstation counts as "authenticated user" I have mine set to just be everyone read.

Yea. I've fiddled it a bit ove rthe last 2 days and most stuff works altho not everything as advertised. Changing your alias in a channel only seems to be possible by rejoining with Pidgin but wth spark you can right click and change. Server side groups I'm writing a really hacky plugin that removes all members and re-adds them every 30 seconds to make presence update. cos I looked at the presence code and got scared. AD integration works well but as you say scheduled restarts are the name of the game to keep it synced.

I'm looking at XMPP from 2 angles at the moment 1 school related 1 personal related. Year 8-10 Internet citizenship skills and teacher to teacher communication in the classroom from a work point of view. Allowing memebers of a world of warcraft guild to chat outside game as an out of work side project. Now I evaluated various technologies for both from good old IRC to worldwide IM networks like ICQ and of course the MS exchange behemoth. I've come to the conclusion that I want to be able to sandbox the school one with no external links. Its just not worth the security and filtering issues. The personal one I don't really care about federation either it just might be fun to play with. At the end of the day it all seems to come down to XMPP / Jabber. It offers standard IM features very much like yahoo, MSN, Facebook, Myspace, AIM messenger client pupils will use in the real world and it can be kept totally internal and fully logged. Now having picked XMPP I find that clients are a dime a dozen, very advanced and there is a flavour for everyone. For the home use app people can ideally pick their own client. For school I'll likely be picking pidgin as the xml nature of its config files means I can write them with logon scripts and make the whole thing seamless for users. Finally we have Server choice and this is where I'm stuck on both counts. The latest feature comparison I can find online is late 2007. Server implimentations have come and gone since that list. Ejabbered, openfire, and jabbered 2.0 seem to be the most actively projects at present. Openfire was clearly the easiest initial setup. I ran it for the outside school project first it was easy setup so set it up in work too and got LDAP working no problem. Took some tweakign to get groups sorted but got it fiddled too. Now I'm seeing some holes. The WoW players are finding niggles in openfire's implimentation. It works well with spark and is feature complete as far as that client is concerned. But when teamed with pidgin Nickname changing for channels doesn't seem to work. Profile field updates either don't take effect or take effect after a logout logon and then become locked forever. I created a default group for all users on this server too but it doesn't update. You see the list of people who were in the group when you joined it but not people who subsiquently join it. I've started looking at the code and I'm thinking this is beyond my ability to tweak / fix. Now I'm back at the beginning considering other server software but there are no reviews, blog entries etc with people experiences with other servers that are any way recent. So I thought I'd ask here. If you've implimented Jabber in a work or non work project. Which server software did you pick and how do you find its feature set, stability and client compatibility?

I have had this problem with builds too. But I think it was because I was building the machines in an OU which has our basic workstation GPO and domain GPO applied to it. They include disabling the local admin account and I thought the problem was that the sif file couldn't change the password of a disabled account. So the fact my local admin accounts may or may not have a password doesn't bother me as they are disabled.

For me faster with games especially. The latest version of the nvidia driver that was released the same week seems much better than the windows update one we were running on win7 7000. I have a friend who is suffering the stuttering with the RC1 who was previously running windows vista without issue. Its fine when idle but under heavy load (playing wow or running prime95) it starts to momentarily stall at regular intervals. It may be an imature chipset driver or something like that. We're hoping that google can figure it out for us tonight

The Consensus is clear already but I'll add my 2p. You have the right idea going for a non mission critical project to get started with linux. Creating a server with a role in mind and getting it working and then tweaking it over time maybe adding a few more roles is the best way into Linux. While Fedora might have a stronger server rep combined with is support by IBM and CentOS is probably the leader in the thoroughbred server OS stakes from a security and system footprint point of view Ubuntu is stable, secure enough out of the box and the wealth of help available is the best of any so I vote go that way. A couple of clarifications for the inevitable *distro Zealot* response. I know CentOS is no more hardened than any other Linux distro but its minimalist build from scratch approach tends to lead to very low footprint systems with a low profile on the network because they are carefully configured by someone with plenty of experience who knows exactly what they need to make any give task work without bloat. I'm also not belittling Fedora's community or help. Its just from personal experience if you google an Ubuntu problem you will get information or instructions that are accurate to the current state of the OS much faster. Fedora has gone through allot of changes since it was redhat. I started at redhat 4 and there is allot of assumed knowledge behind most of its help articles which will seem an insurmountable obstacle to a genuine nix virgin.

I'm with the CAT5e here. The technology of 1000mbit has matured now and all our recent switch purchases will do 1gb to the desktop over our Cat5 and cat5e. In a few cases I've had to clip the ends and terminate it again but thats down to a bad install or wear. I have every expectation that in a decade somone will have figured out how to put 10gb down Cat5e and if nothing else you can tie 2 or 4 Cat5e together for a trunk line very cheaply.

When we bought CS3 around this time last year I used the enterprise deployment system to install it with an admin installer account with a logon script. Went smoothly enough but took a LONG LONG time. I decided it wasn't realistic long term for rebuilds as it takes as long for the CS3 install as the windows + other other app installs. The adobe installer wont win any prizes for speed regardless of the hardware it is on it would seem. This year I put it in the base image for the machines before sysprepping them and it has been fine. The install times are around 25-35 mins from PXE boot to user logon prompt with CS3 in the image. It was 40+min with the installer run as admin. Our periods are 35mins long so I like to keep a re-image time within that.

I don't know if offering the UK government with its world renowned IT miss spending, failed projects and data losses as an upstanding example is the best idea Seriously tho any disaster can be planned for but really there is a limit to what is realistic within a school budget and the realities of school life. I agree entirely that a VM system with SAN and offsite backup my personal choice has been to use DAS drives for that is the way to go to allow operations to continue after significant hardware failure. If its a disc error it should be minutes to recover if users even notice a disc has failed at all. Server Failure it should be a matter of hours as VMs can be shifted and run on remaining functional hardware. Redundant PSUs in servers I consider a minimum spec requirement which avoids most cases this could happen. Beyond this I think good offsite backs to allow a restore a day or 2 later on alternate hardware is totally acceptable. If your server room is vandalised or burns to the ground a couple of days is acceptable. I have tested a plan in house to use the desktop machines in 1 computer room to run the server VMs which would allow 90% of our network to function even if the server room was destroyed like this. It wouldn't be fast and there would be some missing functionality like the extended storage system we have for media pupils editing video but admin and basic academic use could continue a day later. If you go beyond this scenario to flood or major fire consuming multiple computer suites etc 1 day recovery is not even logical. The school will not be open the day after an event like that maybe not for weeks afterward and there will be time to order new equipment and restore from backup. You should be able to protect against disc and Power failure very cheaply and I would consider this a minimum spec on new server purchases. Redundant power supplies, UPS and RAID 1 for system drive RAID 5 for user space. Upon failure of 1 server the network should function fully. A loss of performance is acceptable until new hardware is purchased. Beyond that a few days to a fortnight is unavoidable and should not cause that much disruption relative to whatever event the school has fallen victim too to cause it.

This depends purely on Use. If the machines on those switches are standard Web browsing and MS office machines then 1 GB link to your core switch an the edge switches daisy chained will be plenty. Assuming either a server to local documents and profile copy on logoff and logon or a my documents remap / mapped network drive. If those machines will have heavier use ie compilers, video or sound editing you should probably think about either 10GB single fibre or put a few extra pairs into use for 1GB per switch. It just comes down to how much data you really need to move back and forward over that link.

Open office currently lacks a direct Publisher equivalent. Publisher was only added to MS Office in 2003 I think previously it was a stand alone product. Its functionality is more in line with a basic Indesign or Quark Express than a word processor. I'm afraid the only option for opening the files is MS publisher itself. The embedded image compression system even makes raw text almost impossible to recover from the files.

Sounds like you have a quota set per user on that volume for the server and the admin account you are trying to write to it from has used up their's. On the server check the properties of that drive for Quotas.

Another user of sims admission numbers here. We use a letter to distinguish year group which that year keeps their in time in school and the last 4 digits of their sims admission number. so... Y7123 G9186 N9812 etc.. Pupils keep their username from First to upper 6th years. User folder contents is purged at the end of 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 5th forms. Their accounts are deleted after the summer they leave.

We replaced outlook for staff which was LEA hosted and broken more often than it was working with google apps. It works very well its fast and intuitive but we haven't rolled it out for students for the same reasons outlined above. The the features neccessary to make it safe to use with pupils just aren't available. I tried putting it through a mail gateway of our own whihc does give you archival. But it would take a much more sophisticated configuration to make it really work.