Yeah, we're similar at my workplace in a lot of ways. We only have about 6 windows, 6 macs, and 4 U10's. But we get administrative rights to the windows machines. This is basically in case we need to install something temporarily to help someone with it. Since we all have keys to the building, and we're all students, sometimes due to the irresponsibility of some people, the machines end up with a bunch of junk like kazaa on them. But rather than taking away administrative rights or anything like that, Andrew, who is in charge of the computers keeps a clean ghost image, and just wipes the machines back to their previous states pretty much every week. Then he does have some script where you need to enter in the computer name or something. The multicasting seems to help when he needs to download 3 or more of them at a time, but I have no idea of how much effort it took for him to set that up. But yeah, since we're open for walk-ins from 9-5, but open for calls until 7, 5-7 is usually game night, and 7:00 is time to download the machine again. Its a much cleaner solution than trying to uninstall the program. Our systems work great all the time. (If they ever start to act funny, we can always download them again, and they should be fine). Andrew often argues with the userlab staff because he really likes his ghosts, and they really like their odd distributed .msi system.
-Eric Hattemer On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 08:52, Jeff Zidek wrote: > I don't dispute what you said about Norton Ghost except one thing. The > max of eight workstations. I have used Ghost to multicast 64 > workstations at once over a weekend. We started them on Friday and left > and came back to 64 new workstaions on Monday. This was on Windows 2000 > systems though. To deal with the fact that it makes them (ununique > systems) I run sysprep before I make the image shutdown without letting > it reboot and reboot onto ghost multicast bootdisk. If anyone is > interested I have a trick so that when the 2000 systems boot all you > have to do is enter a new computer name click next then next again and > your done. To do this just use the XP setup manager to make your > sysprep text file and run it under 2000 sysprep. Seem it's just that > the setup manager in 2000 doesn't have all the available features in the > XP version. Don't use the sysprep program from XP just the setup > manager. Works like a dream. Won't even have to click that pesky EULA > or enter a Product Activation Number. > > Jeff Zidek
