Preparing a WinXP pro Computer lab

Hello,

At the tech school that I went to my teacher would ghost the machines everyday prior to class. He had a specific profile he saved on his hard disk with the "admin" account for us. Since we were always doing stuff like promoting machines to DC, or creating RAS servers and stuff like that. It would take him about 15-20 minutes to ghost 15-20 machines at one time. This was done twice a day.

You have to make sure that the hardware on the machines are all the same though.

I have about 20 large and many small computer labs under my control ranging from Elementary schools to Adult Education. The trick is finding a ballance between having the computer locked down so much that your users can just barely do what they need to or leaving them open but rebuilding them frequently.
Over my seven years doing this I have found that the single most important factor is the lab monitor and how they conduct business in the lab. An organized teacher who is monitoring the computer use and enforcing verbal policies will have far fewer problems. I have two high school labs that are configured exactly the same. I spend literally 3 to 4 times as much time in the lab where the teacher is more permissive with his students. (sorry I started to get up on my soap box)
In most of our XP labs we are allowing the students to log in with a user account. Setting verbal instructions about screen savers Icon placement etc. And use Ghost images to restore the workstations when things get out of hand. I've set up ghostcasting on the teachers station (a shortcut that sets up all of the perameters selects the image etc.) And then I have a boot disk for the workstations that is customized for this connection so that the lab attendant can rebuild the computer simply and easily.

In the past we have used:
--Desklock (for locking down elementary schools)
--Fortres 101 (for locking down High schools, this is my personal favorite)
--Net Support School (to monitor students)

I have also been hearing some very good things about a product called Deep Freeze though I have not been able to try it out myself yet.

you can Email me if you have specific questions csilveira@lmusd.org
Chris

--

you are thinking of setting up workgroup? i bet you would be happier with win 2k server based domain. workgroup requires user accounts/policies to exist on each pc. if you used a domain you could pretty easily set up predefined user accounts with policy settings and mandatory profiles to lock stuff down the way you want. allows for centralized administration, storage/backup for students on-going projects....also provide single point-of-failure to bring whole lab down...
check out these topics at support.microsoft.com:
Active Directory
default profiles
mandatory profiles
the 'all users' folder
group policies
automated installation (sysprep and syspart)
have fail-safe anti-virus. be aware of what you allow in from the outside. eg. students bringing in tools/games from the outside. (you want to ban this? personally, i want to see what they got.) (stepping on soapbox)abuse should have consequences naturally. otoh i think it is bad idea to try to lock kids down too tight. personally i haven't learned much lately with out screwing it up first...plus the more you push the more they push back and there is always a way for them to get you...have students monitor each other?
no security without physical security, in particular put win2k server in locked room...
they will take ram, hard disks etc. so padlock the boxes. lol.
you can use fortres but i say those are for weanies (rdl) and imho they are not going to help your career except prove you can spend money with the best of them... you can do it better, cheaper with out of box group policies and stuff already built into XP and win2k server.
ghost is cool tool which WILL help your career (smile). you will encounter perhaps unexpected DOS related restraints on what you can do with ghost and those images are BIG. try it on your lab hardware asap imho.
you can reinstall system on name brand workstations easy because they all come prepared to recover the system to factory state these days...

In our school system we use Deep Freeze. Anything that the students change or save is deleted when the computer is restarted. just have them save their work on shared folder on the server. You can also create what is called a "thaw space" where students can save their work. You can configure the size of the thaw space. When you need to do work, you thaw the computers, do upgrades, etc, and "freeze" them back. A program called a "Administrator Console" can be installed on the teacher computer, which can be used to thaw or freeze all the computers at one time, or you can choose which ones to thaw or freeze. You can also set deep freeze to shutdown the computer at a certain time, so you do not have to do it mannually.

If you have any other questions, please ask them here.

Brandon

In pertaining to the Deep Freeze another good program is provided by Norton. My College recently purchased a site license with them. They offer a program called GoBack. its only about $40-$50 not sure if that was per copy or total...price was pulled from their site.

http://www.symantec.com/goback/

This might be along the lines of the best way togo...you can set it up to revert back to the saved format. Its a faster way than Ghosting the machines...that and it doesn't take up the network badwidth that Ghosting does. I've had my network on the verge of death a few times.

This question was closed by the author