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a networked class environment

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I am a trainer at a company that has an in-house training room with six PCs and six Macs running on a network. I’m looking for software that will return all the computers back to the standard configuration when rebooted (i.e., all customizing and new folders and files would be removed) so that each class will have the same starting point and the students will all be looking at the same thing. Any suggestions for software that will do this?

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a networked class environment

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Norton’s GhostPro. I was an Computer Training Manager with 4 classrooms and a total of 50 machines. Ghost allowed me to not only re-image the machines to have identical configurations, but I was able to have multiple configurations on the server as images which could be brought down to any machine at any time. And, depending upon how fast your network is, you can simultaneously ghost a classroom of 11 machines in about 20 minutes.

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For your PC’s, you might wish to try a product called Deep Freeze <http://www.deepfreezecanada.com>. Once you set the machine up the way you want it, “lock” it with Deep Freeze and it will be set back to default with each reboot. When we first installed it, we did a deltree of the c:\windows directory from a DOS prompt and after restarting, all was back.
For your Macs, try a shareware program called Assimilator <http://www.stairways.com/info/products.html>. We use this for our Macs and although not as easy as Deep Freeze, it works quite well and can be automated to run at startup or shutdown.

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Here is a recommendation that requires no third party software. I work in area that has four classrooms with twenty servers in each room. In addition we have day and night classes in these rooms.

We have partitioned are hard disk drives into 4 partitions.

C:\ drive remains unchanged, it holds the boot files.
D:\ drive is used for daytime classes
E:\ for evening classes.
F:\ holds a copy of D:\ and E:\ (a copy that is the default configuration we want when students begin a class.

So for example. When an evening class is finished we format E:\ and copy the default configuration from F:\ to E:\. The E:\ drive is now ready for the next evening class.

F:\ is also a bootable drive, we boot to F:\ for the format and copy operation.

One person can perform the format and copy operation on all twenty computers in less than an hour.

Hope this helps.

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I am the sys admin and the lead trainer for a k-14 public school. We use a combination of different products to take care of our 300 plus systems. We use Deep Freeze and Ghost Enterprise 6.5 for our various classes. Ghost allows us to store images for several different training senarios. Deep Freeze will do the trick for Windows 9x/ME (and it works GREAT–http://www.deepfreezeusa.com). It does not work with NT, 2000, or the Mac.

For NT, or 2000 you can assign guest rights and policies to the training computers and the settings will return to normal. If set right none of the vital settings will be changed, but this does not take into consideration the needs of training users who need a higher level of access. In this situation weuse Ghost to Reimage all of the systems remotely, or with a hidden partition and a simple batch file.

For the Mac we use the Apple Network Administrator Toolkit (www.apple.com/networking/anat/). This product has been very helpful for our Mac labs, for our powerbooks, and our imacs.

In the past we have also used the diskcopy utility that comes with the Macintosh systems and burned images to CDRs and just dragged and dropped. You can also copy the image to a shared network drive or another partition/drive, and write an applescript to automate the task to run before the system shuts down.

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I use the centurion guard. It is a hardware device that locks down the had drive on the physical level. All edits are actually stored on the D: drive. And when the machine restarts the first thing it does is wipe the D: drive. It works great. Ihave been trying to crash a machine with it, and cannot. Just take a look at thier sight.

Centurion Technologies Home

I have it on 81 of my machines, and it works great.

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This is a hardware solution. The Centurion Guard by Centurion Tehnologies, is a great hardware device that locks the station down. This is done by using a physical removable key. Once you reboot the machine, all changes are removed. I have this runing in three labs and it is running well. Information can be found at http://centuriontech.com

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