Deman

Well after numerous guess/checks I managed to get it sorted by creating a test IIS site, dumping a copy of the most problematic Cisco content in there, adding authentication, testing and then seeing what's different. Turns out the root of IIS didn't have the authentication method set as well as enable guest access. Never noticed it before because I didn't think it would matter on the root configuration. Anyway after clicking Ok, telling it to overwrite the subsequent folders and then removing the guest account from those folders (heh woops, but meh) It seems to be working fine

Hi there, I'm encountering a strange issue with some of our Cisco content is causing IIS to prompt a login box. I'm not quite sure how to explain it really, it's bizzare and I'm not sure whats caused it to do that The authentication method we're using is Integrated authentication. Only the Cisco course material is affected, some more than others. I.e. IT Essentials course content prompts a login box for every single page, others rarely (if at all) Other pages such as the download page (and download files), main page, about page etc have no trouble at all I don't believe anything I've changed has caused the webserver to go into a spin. I've moved the site to PHP and setup custom error pages for 404, 401 and 500. Can't see how that can affect things (Cisco content btw is Cisco's own provided content, I haven't touched that) Any ideas would be greatly appreciated

What I do is have a template pxelinux boot instruction file and then use a batch script to copy the template to 0%macAddress% (I have a csv file with a list of mac addresses, computernames etc) When the PCs boot they boot into the desired OS, when they've finished their task the pxeboot file is deleted

Hi there, I've been trying to figure out why a printer keeps appearing in the computers Printers folder. I've run gpresult which has found the policy setting but the "winning GPO" is simply a bunch of random characters really. I've tried looking for the {069... folder under SYSVOL\policies and couldn't find it. I then attempted to create a blank GPO, copy it's physical folder and rename it to {069 etc and that didn't work either It seems hell bent on staying there, one of those annoying bugs that I can't seem to clean up. Does anybody have any ideas

3.5 includes .NET 2 as well? I'll have to check that out. Cheers

A partition structure similar to Linux, i.e. OS, Programs, Profiles. If you have to reinstall the OS then you simply can without losing your profiles or programs Better licensing, KMS is good but I shouldn't have to create twice as many images simply to please your anti-piracy requirements. Either allow multiple syspreps with rearm or allow the CMID key to be unique when using the -norearm switch in the unattend.xml file. Not everybody can use Microsoft Deployment and have nice cool unattended installs of every program. If the current Windows server administration tools don't work with Windows 7 then release some that do at the same time as Windows 7. I don't ever want to see a repeat of this again "we'll release Server 2003 adminpak for Vista shortly"... yeah, it's been over a year now guys. Sure there's a hack to get the pack to to install but it's still unacceptable. Likewise with Group Policy Management Console, if you're going to take tools out with the installation of a service pack then provide the installer for it at the same time as the pack is released. It doesn't need to have added features and functionality, you can do that later. We shouldn't be deprived of functionality. Sorry gone off track a bit there (it's a bit of a sore spot). Anyway Video playlists for Media Center would be great. You have them for music so why not video? Less versions, perhaps drop Home Basic and keep Home Premium, Business and Ultimate. Companies were selling dirt cheap PCs with 512Mb RAM and Vista Home Basic. The OS ran like a dog with a loaded AV and Microsoft gets the blame An enhanced network diagnostic tool would be nice, I remember testing the current one and managing to fool it by having a good IP but rubbish DNS server entries. It thought the Internet was down and suggested using DHCP. It should be simple enough to ping test a known IP, then test the DNS equivilent. You could really be clever and see if you can check the local and international link A nice installer where I only ever need to pick my country once and from that the default options for other things (timezone, dictionary, etc) are based from that choice. Obviously many countries have multiple time zones but for that simply jump to one of them. A search function for things like Group Policy and Windows AIK options would be good, the features are there but they can be a right pain to find sometimes The ability to run .NET programs in WinPE, things like system.io and system.network (or whatever it is) would be nice. That's all I can think of for now. I can't remember if Vista does all of point 7 or just some of it. I'm sure it's better than the XP, 2000 etc installer but don't recall it basing everything on it.

Hi there, I'd like to do some simplifying of our domain setup (fully server 2003 btw). Currently we have two domains, Administration.local and ITD.local. Administration.local being the first to be made (which if I've read correctly is the forest root domain?), ITD.local is the student learning domain Originally the two were created in case the students in their labs accidentally deleted accounts or whatever from ITD, but they never did and since I've learnt about delegated authority they no longer can. What I'd like to do is try and simplify things by removing the Administration domain and subsequently give ITD as many controllers/secondary controllers as I can. It'll also tidy up things like user accounts, groups, trusts etc. I've tried looking around on Google but armed with only a description of what I want to do and not really any terminology I'm not exactly getting very far so can anyone help point me in the right direction, or know whether what I want to do is even possible? Cheers

Just giving an update here. What I've done in the meantime is created the image when Windows has been activated with the KMS server. This gives me about 6 months of use before I have to "edit" the image again so to speak

Since all our servers are now 2003 I'll look into changing the domain. Cheers

Hi again, After some more searching I've managed to get it to work, in my case the steps here worked for me, (had to change the PCI\VEN to match the ones in my txtsetup.oem file of course). I think it was the added inf etc drivers in the i386 folder and txtsetup.sif file that helped. Either way it's going. One thing I did note that I don't think is mentioned here is that Notepad++ shows the hidden end of file marker in txtsetup.sif. It's quite good seeing it there, rather than the having the install fail and you're not sure why Still haven't got it to install via WinPE 2, this thread mentions you need to modify dosnet.inf and place d1,iaStor.sys in various places but it hasn't worked for me yet. Has anybody got this working via WinPE2?

Hi, I'm currently trying to get this to work but am getting nowhere fast. I've created a $OEM$\$1\Drivers\SATA folder on the root of the CD containing the SATA drivers (verified to work as I installed XP with them on a Floppy) I've copied the iaStor.sys file to i386 I've modified TXTSetup.sif I've created a Winnt.sif file with DriverSigningPolicy set to Ignore and OemPnPDriversPath="Drivers\SATA" I can get past the textmode portion of Windows setup, into the Windows XP portion and got as far as final procedures before Windows rebooted and gave me a bluescreen. So close yet so far! Thankfully I'm using a CD-RW otherwise I'd have about 20odd coasters right now I'm also trying a network install of this via WinPE and are having even worse luck, the files copy but upon restart textmode setup sits and claims it can't find iaStore.sys? It's in the i386 folder and the $OEM$ etc folders... it is a .sys file though, not a packaged one. Edit, and now textmode setup isn't working again. Fantastic, I should of made a backup.

I'm trying to get head around groups and whether it's possible to have one that contains members from different domains. Background story Currently we have two domains (Admin and Student). Admin holds all the admin accounts I don't want the students to mess with and Student being what the students learn on. It's also what all the student workstations connect to. Normally the two work well together and I can logon to a student workstation using an account residing in the admin domain (trusts and all that) but with the rollout of Vista I noticed that my account didn't have administrative rights on a machine connected to the student domain. Consequently I got all sorts of UAC prompts and crazy things going on. I thought I could simply remedy this by adding my account to the "local admins" group (a Global Group residing on the student domain) but it wouldn't accept accounts from the admin domain, only the student one. Each time I change the specification to search admin, it wouldn't let me look for user accounts, only contacts. I can select users from a different domain when setting rights for shared folders and ntfs security etc, I just can't add users from a different domain into a group. Other of course than the security permissions for the domain controller. I managed to get my local administrative permissions in the end by adding Admin\Domain admins to Bultin\Administrators in group policy somewhere but I'd like to know why I couldn't just add my account to the group that was already in there, just seems tidier to me. Is this by design or do I have a misconfiguration somewhere? Any help appreciated, cheers Edit: I think I found why, looks like my "local admins" group needs to be a "domain local" and not a global. This is kinda making my head spin...

Hi there, Having a problem with our Vista deployment, where it ends in reduced functionality mode It doesn't really come as a surprise as when I sysprepped the image I purposely told sysprep not to rearm the 30 day trial. I'd much rather "edit" an image (so to speak) than to simply re create it. Oracle isn't the most fun to install as are multiple other programs we use so once they're on I'd rather leave it alone. Anyway as the 30day countdown has long expired since deployment as soon as Vista has finished establishing itself it jumps into reduced functionality mode. I've tried adding a batch script with the slmgr -rearm and -ato commands at first run but it doesn't seem to run it. I have to do it manually. RFM seems to kick in before firstrun. Given that you can only use the rearm script 3 times or so before it fails I don't want to use it before creating the image. Does anybody have any ideas or will SP1 sort this out somehow? Cheers

You could try this ping 127.0.0.1 /n 2 > NUL Where 2 = a number of times to ping. Bit cheap but it works Alternatively you could remove the start from "start c:\temp\setup.exe /s" That way the batch script won't continue until setup.exe has finished

Hi all I'm currently looking for new ways of rejoining newly re-imaged computers back into the domain again and am wondering whether the following is doable somehow 1. Boot into WinPE2 and deploy image 2. Reset domain computer account (somehow) 3. Copy over modified sysprep.inf (for XP) or unattend.xml (for Vista) file which contains the proper computername 4. Reboot and allow sysprep to join the domain as the proper computername it's meant to be If I'm lucky the bonus would be I wouldn't have to have a script to move the computer to it's proper OU and would also save myself a reboot (I'm currently using Netdom in conjunction with wsname which deletes the old domain computer allowing the rename to occur) Apparently you can swap out Vista's unattend.xml file provided you do it before it reboots as others do this (not sure about XP) but I know/remember that if you were to try and join the domain using a computername that's already registered the domain controller will reject the request. So somewhere that domain computer will need to be reset Is there anyway that this can be scripted and performed within WinPE2? I looked into Netdom /reset but I'm not sure if that will do it? Cheers

Thanks for your suggestions guys, I've tried them all with several variations and still no luck. I renamed the inf file to give the "net" prefix, no such luck I found a Vista and XP2K driver on the Intel site and did both the peimg /inf command and also the manual copy for both, again no luck there. I found a walkthrough here which spoke about adding the cat file to \winsxs\manifests which I also tried, with both the drivers I mentioned above and their example. Again no luck, mind you given the year it was posted I'd say they were using WinPE and not WinPE2 What is it with the D510 that makes things so difficult Not to mention frustrating The only difference I see when I copied the files over manually was the WinPE background would dissapear and be replaced with a black background. Other than that, still the same error "Unable to contact IP driver error code 1753" Edit: After a bit more investigation I've found you can use the drvload utility to attempt to load the driver but when I attempted that I got the code 0xe0000233 which is nice, sadly Google showed nothing about what it could mean. Interestingly enough when I ran the command again I got 0x80070070. Bizzare, sometimes you get the former, othertimes you get the latter. Edit again. I threw in an extra 256mb of RAM (totalling 512) and it worked. On the original boot.wim I am going to kick something Seriously though, I'm a bit curious about that, as our old celerons with only 256mb of RAM have managed to boot into it, it was off a CD-ROM though... hmm that could be the reason

Hi all, I'm having difficulty getting our new(ish) HP D510's to gain network access, (despite WinPE booting from the network!?) I've tried a number of different drivers using the peimg /inf: etc commands and while they do go into the mount\windows\etc directories WinPE still can't access the network. In desperation I installed Windows, installed the NIC (Intel 10/100 VM) so to ensure that yes the drivers do indeed work. After a bit of searching somebody suggested to copy all the driver files used for the NIC to their equivalent paths in WinPE, but that didn't work either. I even went back to the HP site and downloaded their other NIC drivers they had available, the older Intel drivers would work in XP, but not in WinPE. They also had some Broadcom ones but they didn't work in XP, let alone WinPE. I've run out of ideas here, the boot wim is fine for all our other machines, including one or two that are far newer than the D510 series. Does anybody have any suggestions?

Hi, got a question that's been on my mind which I haven't quite been able to nut out. Switches, managed switches that is. 1. If you've got 2 managed switches linked together what would happen if you add an unmanaged switch in between them creating a loop (i.e two links between the 2 main switches, one is direct other contains an intermediary unmanaged switch). 2. You have an unmanaged switch connected to a managed but on that unmanaged you hook a cable between two of its ports creating a loop. My suspicion is for in scenario 1 STP would block one of the ports preventing the loop. But for the other I'm not really sure what it would do. Whether STP can do anything or whether you have to configure another protocol to do so. From my recollection STP is supposed to prevent broadcast storms but I don't think/know if it can react to them.

Ahhh ok, sorry I didn't realise what that did. Cheers

Thanks for your help guys, sorry gunsmokingman but your examples didn't work (though the If file exists is a good idea that never occurred to me) I switched to using Replace(WScript.ScriptFullName, WScript.ScriptName, "") and it still refused to work It turns out that the run statement is sensitive to spaces in file names (with XP anyway). So after a bit of jiggling to get the right amount of "s it's working on XP! The code used is actualPath = Replace(wscript.scriptfullname,wscript.scriptname, "") quotedPath = """" & path IF objFSO.FileExists(actualPath & "Install\Install_DotNET2.exe") Then objShell.Run (quotedPath & "Install\Install_DotNET2.exe""") Else MsgBox("Can Not Find This File") End If I'm not too sure why I can't use the quotedPath variable in the FileExists statement in the same style as the Run (I'm not really familiar with Vbs) but it works. Again, cheers for the help ..Hopefully Vista will take the statement and not throw an error

Hi, unfortunetly no. Again I encounter the same "does not exist" (or whatever) error as before. Vista is perfectly happy with it Bizzare

Hi there, I'm having the strangest problem in getting my vbscript to work. Basically what the script does is check if the .NET framework is installed, and if it isn't the script provides the option to install it. The script can run the executable provided it is situated in the same folder as the script itself. But since I like things to be tidy I want this (and other installs) to be in a separate folder which is one step above the current directory (be it C, D or whatever the CD rom happens to be at the time). The code I'm using is this objShell.Run (objShell.currentDirectory & "\Install\Install_DotNET2.exe") It runs in Vista, but refuses to run in XP resulting in "file not found" errors, but when I stuck an if statement to search for the install file, it found it fine?? To give you a better idea of what I mean by that I did this If objFSO.FileExists(objShell.currentDirectory & "\Install\Install_DotNET2.exe") Then MsgBox(".NET is installed") End If And it worked I can't understand it. An if statement can find it, but a run statement can't?? So if anybody could help me out here It'd be much appreciated

I think it's getting there but not quite. I'm not seeing a universal way of creating a bootable flash drive yet (i.e Right click drive, format, create boot disk), in fact even when I make one the BIOS on one lab that I manage refuses to acknowledge it as a removable drive but instead a hard drive and as such makes it difficult to boot off as it's lumped underneath the main HDD in priority. So for me booting off one is rather finicky. Floppy's are still used in our older labs for accessing the Imaging menu (no PXE on those NICs) and also have a few scripts etc on another that detects whether or not 2 drives are present in the machine, and of course memory tests. Simple things in other words, which can be shifted to be run from a PXE network boot but yeah it comes back to having that ability in the first place. Sure you could use bootable CDs but in my opinion it's just not as quick and easy to pop a CD in like you can a floppy or USB

Ok cheers. I suppose on the upside of things as well when the time comes to actually sell them, people will be more willing to buy it if it comes with Windows

For all the licensing gurus out there I've got a question for you We currently hold two license agreements with Microsoft (MSDNAA and a Volume licensing enterprise agreement *or something like that*) and am wondering whether or not we would be breaching license if we were to purchase PCs without any OEM Windows on them and instead use that money to say up the size of the monitor or something? I see it as "we're paying twice for Windows" (well 3 times if you want to drag in MSDNAA) but another disagrees and that the volume license sits atop of OEM (which given Microsoft and licensing, anything is possible I suppose) Does anybody know for sure?