Teth

Printers are assigned in the rooms by a script. I didn't have any complaints about printing today but first thing I check tomorrow will be that because I've had a similar problem with publisher and A3 pages. No error just wouldn't do it.

The thing is 2 full rooms of machines are able to create reports just fine and they are subject to the same GPOs. The fact that an admin account cannot create a report either also lead me away from GPO as the cause. The only difference between the systems that can and those that can't is the windows install. They are a different RIS image but the same GPO deployed install of office. I'm just not sure what aspect of a windows install could cause this but I'll continue testing.

Ok I have installed 5 computer suites this summer and bar a few permissions glitches with Delphi everything seemed to be working beautifuly. Until today. Access was deployed by GPO using the standard office install + a transform created using the office resource kit's little utility. There is also a GPO attched to the base workstation policy to restrict the universal file open dialogue and macros etc of office which applies to all 5 rooms and is being loaded and applied. However in the 3 rooms in question when you try to create a report in design view nothing happens no error no crash it just doesn't do it. Even with full logging on nothing even shows in eventviewer as a reason why it didn't happen. This is true with a student mandatory profile, teacher mandatory profile or a full admin account. If you try to create a report with the wizard it lets you make all the choices and then when you hit finish it says "the report could not be created" still no report in event viewer of any restriction implimentation permissions error or anything. So basicaly I have nothing to go on at all for my fault finding so. Has anyone seen this or anything like it before ?

We recently bought 60 Optiplex Desktop Machines for a revamp of 2 Suites + technical office. 2.8gig P4 1gig ram 60gig HDs Needless to say the price the website quotes is not what you pay when you phone the local Dell education rep. We're very pleased with the results and the 3 years of onsite service that they happly threw in is great for peace of mind given the proprietry nature of the motherboards they use.

Yea thats exactly the part. When you choose copy it the dialogue asks you where to put it and crucially what to change the permissions on the profile too. I recopied the profile when I got in this morning remembering to add Staff this time and it worked flawlessly.

Funny you should mention. After wasting 30mins before I came home today on a new Staff profile that wont apply. I remebered half way home that copying it with the GUI isn't enough I should set permissions first.... oops

I have built 2 new domain controlers a WSUS/Symantec AV/Printman + server and a Filebox. Unboxed and installed 60 New mahcines in 2 IT suites and my own office. 28/29/3 respectively. Stripped and refurbed 28 machines in another room using the ram from the machines to be dumped from the previously mentioned rooms. These have been added to the new network and they're old DC retired. Stripped and refurbed 44 machines in 2 media rooms and added them to the new network thus turning 3 Isolated NT4 doamins into 1. Packaged and deployed Office, Delphi, VIsual studio, Photoshop and Macromedia studio to these machines. Numerous other other apps like interactive CDROMS, ASM tutor, Logo etc running from the network server. All by myself and I managed to get a weeks holiday in there too. And yet I'm still panicing because the timetabler still hasn't provided me with pupil and staff lists to make accounts on this network... pupils arrive friday

The XP templates replace the 2k ones and are backwards compatible as far as I remember from my MCPs. MS recomend you always do any Group policy editing from a workstation with the admin pak installed on it. It will check the adm versions on the Workstation and the server and update the server one if required.

I've long believed that once you've memorised a product key it should be yours Lets see that in the volume license agreement MS.

here we use 7 colours and their username is prefaced with that colour. So for example last years Upper 6th were White so this years first years will be White. All other years will keep they're colours.

On the monitoring / Machine to machine confusion issue my new Logitech cordless desktop at home for my HTPC has an option for encryption between the keyboard and PC which is fairly straight forward to set up. Press button on keyboard > press on screen button > type in code from screen to keyboard. I still would not use them in a school environment or anywhere there is more than 5+ machines tho. There have been some issues at nealry every large lan gaming competition I've run or attended. Surprisingly not just with channel confusion or shortage also with Belkin keyboards just obliterating any other signal in a 5-10meter radius causing any MS or Logitech peripharls to just not be able to connect at all.

Seems like you need to start using Mandatory profiles. Stay with your existing user folder system it is the industry best practice. Keep your user accounts too but change they're profile to a mandatory profile which you creat once and then save to a folder on the server to be loaded by every user as they log on. As long as all your software is conficgured correctly when you save the profile all users will get that configuration and even if they manage to find a chink in your group policy and alter it on the local machine, when they next log on they will get a clean copy of the deault profile again.

Intresting thread. This is something I'm intrested in too due to the fact the school I'm in being 3 stories and a sprawling single story extension with PCs dotted everywhere I wanted to cut down my leg work I am deviod of cash for this particular pet project tho so I've been looking for open source / free ware posibilities and found eaglevision 2. http://www.calstatela.edu/its/techsupport/hardware/desktop/winsupport/eaglevision.htm Its quite full featured with WOL, Remote shutdown, Remote login etc. Its based on VNC so it runs in many situations were windows itself has frozen up which I've found to be a boon so far. I want to make it a tool for teachers to monitor classrooms as well as me providing support and monitoring which is proving a little more difficult. I'm hopeful I'll get enough time in the next few weeks to start messing with its config files and see if I can get control of restircted views etc for each suite. At the moment the consol will list every machine in the school that is running Eaglevision. If anyone has success with this or can find some documentation on it I'd love to hear from you we can compare notes. Also if anyone finds a better free one I'd like to know that too

Depends what other games they're gonna have really. Frogger doesn't intrest me but if theres an R-Type or something then its likely. Lord knows I've got more than my £5 worth out of Geometry wars Mutant storm has been great fun too. PS. preparing a new RIS image on P3 750s in 30 degree heat makes me sad.

Use PMP here too I think its great. Used PCcounter in my old place and had alot of counting errors and printing getting canceled fr no good reason. PMP seems to co-operate with alot more different printer drivers. On another not currently we're run a system of 10 pages per week and no printing in colour unles you ask your teacher and they ask me to unpause the colour printer. Do you think it will work with secondary level to charge higher prices for colour and mark it on the printers and give them say 40 credits a month mono costing 1 credit colour costing say 4 credits? Will they think about what printer they send they're print job to or am I better staying with the currnt system ? My head of ICT said try it if you think it will work so you can guess what he thinks

when Lighting techs, Painters or electricians come I borrow they're scafolding platform for a a couple of mins.

Door is still open but I wish any thieves luck. Opens onto an enclosed courtyard now utterly surrounded by new buildings over the last decade and a bit the lowest of which is 2 storeys. However the potential for flooding keeps me awake at night as the courtyard is served by 1 little 3" drain.

Servers in the Basement were 42degrees internal temp by 10 this morning so I opened the door and left to move 30 PCs + monitors down 2 floors in this heat. Then I went home and lay under the lawn sprinkler for 3 hours until now!

Hi mark, fantastic piece of software you've written here I have always liked creating user lists in excel and this just makes it so easy to copy and paste them and then go. All done in seconds. I have one small niggle tho. When I run add users I'm getting little popup boxes saying "Retrys 1" or "Retrys 2" for each user. The script suceeds and everything is correct just wondering if theres someting you might know is wrong with my AD or some advice on adding a slight delay maybe to the script so that it waits a second between user incase its just flooding my server.

I'm running Vista on 3 machines Dell optimax 170l desktop 1gig ram with built in 8meg graphics. Aero works but without transparency, which amazed me. AMD Athlon 1.4ghz 1gig ram and a geforce 4ti 128meg Works flawlessly with the drivers included with vista on this and seems no slower than the server 2003 it was running before. P4 3.2ghz 1gig ram geforce 6800 256mb. Aero works flawlessly before and after upgrading to the driver nvidia have on they're site but performance on this machine in Vista is well bellow XP altho it does still run WoW and Guildwars playably same can't really be said for Quake 4 at 1280x1024.

Purchased a new version very recently and read all the docs before hand so its fresh in the brain. It supports both and has alot of specific "modules" for want of a better word specificaly written for printers that cause trouble with the generic methods. Of the whole new network build / install I'm doing solo right now it has been the fastest install and setup flawlessly in no time. Well worth the slightly higher cost.

I got time to solve the shortcut problem at last this morning. I'd have preferred a solution that turned it off totally but one didn't seem to exist but in the absence of that adding the hostnames of the servers containing the shortcuts to the IE trusted sites list using domain policy had the desired effect. Users are no longer prompted to aprove the opening of files. All being well after break I'll have time to get encarta deployed too!

I'm already using hostnames and being an old school trained netware user and a bit paranoid I have the servers and admin workstations configured with them. I looked at the spreadsheet posted earlier for adm templates and theres a couple of settings in the SP2 one related to security center that don't seem familiar. First thing tomorrow I'm going to check and then update to SP2 specific ones if neccessary. What isn't made clear is if they are backwards compatible. Is anything removed by using a higher version that would for example affect 2k clients left on the network.

1.1 and 2 think there could be a conflict? The way I understood it was that 2 was different rather than being a replacement. I'll check the machine in detail tmr and see if it has both or if it upgraded the 1.1 to 2.

THanks for the reply I should have said the machines already have .net on and up to date though a WSUS server. The encarta install still insists on trying to start its bundled .net installer anyway. I assume to verify the version or install state. The network install document wants you to execute setup.exe /i /q is there perhaps a way to have a GPO execute that once only for each machine when they first join the network? Only "easy" alternative I see at the moment is to add it to the RIS image before I deploy that to the rest f the machines but I'd always heard that you should install the minumum working system before using riprep and then add the rest based on OUs by GPO.