RogueSpear

Both myself and Shark007 have made installers for this. I also made an addon which you can find by clicking on the link for Addons in my sig.

For quite some time I did have a warning to NOT run any of the runtimes installers that contain .NET 2.0 from anywhere other than svcpack. Then I received several reports from people that they tried it on an existing machine and it worked so... I removed the warning. The issue is that normally, you cannot install .NET 2.0 from svcpack. In order to do this you need to make a registry change, install .NET 2.0, then change the registry back to the way it was. In theory it should all work out no matter where you install it from, but I did have problems myself; hence the warning. I cannot say this for sure, but my guess is that if something interrupts the install process, the registry setting modified will not get changed back to it's original setting and this is what's screwing things up. I'll be sure to put the warning message back in again as there is obviously great potential for this to not work from anywhere other than svcpack.

Unfortunately it looks as though godan hasn't been active here since April So I wouldn't count on anything getting updated or links being refreshed.

Two different people (including myself) with years of RIS experience have suggested disabling AV scanning for the entire volume at a minimum. Not sure what else to say.

With a fairly recent computer, yea it may be overrated somewhat. But with older computers it makes a world of difference. And there's even a world of difference between what Windows Defrag and PerfectDisk will do when it comes to those same machines. In addition to some of the older machines I have at work, I've also done some volunteer IT work for charities and non-profits. An older computer, say a P3-500 with 512MB, is still a perfectly viable Windows XP computer, but it could obviously use all the help it can get. These slower machines also happen to benefit the most from a proper defrag.

Ok so you're one of those people. I figured one source was enough. Everyone here has hopefully heard of a search engine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskeeper

Disable all virus scanning on the RIS volume. That's a big no no.

After Diskeeper totally screwed about a half dozen hard drives on me, I changed to PerfectDisk and haven't had one problem ever. I've been using it now since the version 5 days. Another thing is that I don't like my money going to support a religion - any religion. When you buy Diskeeper your money is going to the Church of Scientology.

I don't want to sound like a jerk but seriously man.. there must be, at a minimum, 2 dozen different threads regarding this issue specifically. It's also discussed in the (outdated but still correct) RIS Guide I wrote which is stickied in this forum.

I used roaming profiles for years at my main job and finally just ditched them about a year and a half ago. The idea behind roaming profiles is nice and all, but even when it's properly configured, all kinds of things can and do go wrong. So what I finally did was add functionality to my domain level machine script that checks to see if there is a newer Default User profile at a specified location on each boot up. If it finds a newer one, it copies it down to the client. I still have My Documents redirected via Group Policy. You may want to give this some consideration as it will save a fair amount of time each time someone logs off and then someone else logs in. As a side benefit, my servers are pretty happy they don't have to deal with the extra 250,000 or so files.

In the old days network browsing was accomplished using NetBIOS, a hideous security hole of a protocol if ever there was one. If you don't have NetBIOS on your computers then you'll either need to install it, use the HOST file method, or rummage in the \Support directory for netbeui (don't even remember how to spell it). The one advantage to the very old and completely unsupported netbeui is that it's not routeable, making it slightly more secure. At home I have everything set to static IPs and just use the HOST file. Something else to keep in mind as this may be related to one of your problems - you cannot create a share on a computer and have another computer connect into it without using an account that has a password. You can use any easy to remember silly password you like, just make sure you have one assigned to all of your different user accounts.

Is your "main PC" a Windows 2000 or 2003 server? If so, is it acting as a DNS server? And again, if so, are your client PCs using it for DNS resolution? If you have your computers all pointing to some DNS server out on the internet, then you can't reasonably expect them to reach each other via DNS.

The location for storing roaming profiles is set at the domain level. I don't think that you're going to find an easy solution for storing them in different places as determined by OU membership.

Update - 20060907 Updated AutoGordianKnot to V2.32 Updated Crap Cleaner to V1.32.345 Updated FileZilla to V2.2.27 Updated Paint.NET to V2.72 Updated QuickTime Alternative to V1.75 Updated Real Alternative to V1.50 Updated RogueSpear's Runtimes Installer to V1.4 Added RogueSpear's Other Runtimes V1.0 Added Spyware Terminator V1.5.00.740 Maintenance Updated IrfanView Maintenance Updated Microsoft Office XP Resource Kit Tools Maintenance Updated Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit Tools The maintenance updates are not version updates. There is no change in functionality or configuration. These three installers are some of my earlier efforts so I simply repackaged the switchless silent installers replacing StartX.exe with RunHiddenConsole.exe and added the appropriate meta data to the exe files. Also I made RVM/nLite Addons for these installers.

I don't yet have any experience with pre-n hardware, but from everything I've been reading lately, mixing vendors isn't always going to work out. Also a few things I have noticed with WiFi in general - if there are other wireless clients within range, but not a part of your specific wireless network, you can get these intermittent reconnects. I've never lost a connection or had an application crap out on me, but I get that little bubble in the corner periodically and I'm somewhat convinced that it's due to a couple of nearby wireless enabled laptops that are not a part of my wireless network. I'm not sure if you took a break for a little while, but it's nice to see you around again in any case

@Siginet, your .ini file method is exactly the way I started to put this into AutoImage. This one will certainly require a bit of testing and fine tuning.

I include VirtualDubMod in my installer. When I make a new one, the Mod will be updated as well. Seeing that you either: Don't bother to read my posts when I state that I am aware of when things are updated or Are intentionally trying to annoy me by telling me anyway VirtualDub and VMTools are now dead last on my list of things to do.

Everything you would need to at least get started should be here.

It totally depends on what it is that you are looking to do. As far as routine admin type chores, Monad was designed with Exchange server in mind. If you're looking to make a GUI application that interacts with the server, then I'd probably look into doing something based on .NET 2.0 - either VB or C#, it probably doesn't matter since they both have access to the same runtime.

I really like to remove dumb things like Briefcase, WordPad, Windows Messenger, Tour, the games, etc. It's nice to have all that crap gone in a work environment and for family members as well. The less there is to play around with, the less things can go wrong - to a point. I wouldn't dream of removing IE or some of the central services that people seem so fond of getting rid of. Oh and I shouldn't forget to mention that removing certain device drivers makes using the DriverPacks much nicer. I've always felt that when removing things from Windows the old axiom "less is more" works wonders. In the hands of restraint, in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, nLite can be an incredible tool. Unfortunately it's degree of usefulness is conversely related to the amount of damage that can be done in the hands of a dilettante.

If your Windows clients are members of the active directory domain the server is hosting, then they should absolutely point to the server (servers if you had more than one AD DC) for DNS. You could accomplish this with the router acting as a DHCP server. You'd just assign the DNS to point only to the server. If you previously had the first DNS server assignment pointing to something other than your own server, I could certainly see that causing grief for you. As a side issue, pointing to a DNS server outside of your AD domain could have negative security implications.

I haven't tried any of them personally because I really haven't found a need for any of the things which they allow. However, if I screw something up then there goes my telephone and my wife's internet access So I'm just sticking with stock. I'm pretty much at a loss for suggestions without being able to actually sit down in front of your machines personally. The only thing I can come up with is to set the QoS level to 0 in the default GPO. Or even disable QoS completely across your Windows machines. I seriously doubt that it would improve the situation, but thought I'd at least throw it out to you.

You need to modify the .msi file and remove a few custom actions. Once you're in there looking at it, they should be obvious. But even after you do that it still won't install from svcpack.inf. When Microsoft first but out Beta 2, I was able to hack it enough so that it would install from svcpack. Then they released a refresh build of Beta 2 and I was unable to get it to install from svcpack.

My mistake.. when I was composing my previous response I thought your DSL modem was a router. In other words I figured the WRT54 to be acting more as a switch/AP with routing functions turned off. I wasn't able to refer to the diagram while writing the response. Indeed you are right, that would create a loop condition.