B
BC
As a consultant of last resort, I get called in when
IT staff and tech support can't resove a problem,
and by that time, people are pissy, angry and/or
defensive. Usually it's a highly technical problem,
and my latest "house call" involved creating a new
public access workstation model for a large public
library that's going from Win95 systems to Win
XP Pro. (Yeah, I know Win95 seems ancient, but
they had Firefox for web browsing, Office 97 for
letters and spreadsheets and such, 3rd party
security apps that really locked down the units,
and a simple, fast reimaging system that made
recovery from blown hard drives and such trivial.)
The only thing technically out of the ordinary was
that at one point years ago they wanted an easy
way to manage and control patron access to the
public worstations. After examiing and testing a
lot of library and cybercafe software, I picked this
cybercafe package by an English company. And
not only did the package rock, bur the software
made a couple of key mods to optimize it for
libary use. It ended being far more sophisticated
and less troublesome than typical much most
expensive and conventional library software.
So the library REALLY wanted to keep using this
cybercafe software for the new workstations, but
their tech staff had trouble figuring out how to do
that, and the tech support from the company
leasing and maintaining the PC's didn't know
anything about that stuff and didn't want to get
involved, and there were deadlines looming.... so I
get called in.
Getting the cybercafe software up and running was
actually pretty trivial -- they simply haven't had to
touch anything all these years, so they were still
using the old version, and weren't too sure about
the new one, blah, blah, blah. The only
complicating factor was deciding on the level of
desired security and how to control it: the cybercafe
software came with workstation security
management, a product called "Deep Freeze" that
they were also using also provides workstation
security, and good old, primitive Active Directory
Services would also be available to manage security
policies. Since Deep Freeze had the most robust
and slick security features (it creates a virtual
sandbox that make it seems like people have a lot
of access to the PC, but actually don't), it was
decided to use that plus a few features of the
cybercafe software to lock down the workstations.
Lastly, since I was working on a model PC that
would be imaged onto about 70 other workstation
PC's, I recommended wiping the retail image
off the PC and doing a clean install from scratch to
create a nice pristine model with all the latest
updates, and a complete, cover-all-bases, updated
program list, especially for multimedia. I knew that
the model and its clones will not be updated for
some time to come.
Wiping a PC and reinstalling from scratch is a
pretty basic thing. I've done it countless times.
Making a standard model PC and cloning/
reimaging that to identical new models is also
pretty basic as well, and I've done that plenty o'
times as well, including XP Pro systems. If you
have an install CD and a valid key, no big whoop.
But this is where my project developed a pile of
problems. I was told that there would be a volume
key for the PC's, but that never materialized --
instead the sticker key had to be used on the
model. Fine. But no CD's came with the HP's.
However you could create them, and these
weren't just image CD's but reinstallation ones.
OK, good. Made 2 sets of those. Good to go.
Wiped the hard drive and created a small 20Gb
partition (nobody will be saving things to the
hard drive, so they was no point to using the
entire drive, and then used the HP CD's to
install XP Pro. It looked like a normal install
but then it started asking for the CD already
inserted. Hmmm..not good. It got stuck in that
loop, so scratch that. Tried the other CD set.
Again normal but then it asked for an unknown
CD for verification -- WTF!? It figures -- the easy
part will be the hard part. Screw this, so I used
my VLK XP Pro SP2 CD I have for repairs to put
back the OS. Everything after that went as
expected.
But the company leasing and managing the
PC's then said that I did a bad thing -- the key
has to be the one on the sticker. They were
reminded that they were suppose to have
delivered a volume key, but .... Alright, fine.
Going from a VLK to an OEM is not that
complicated -- so I had the PC back to its
original sticker key and fully activated and
validated and good to go in about 45 minutes.
The leasing and management company takes
it away to reimage it to a small number of PC's
that were going to be used for initial testing,
especially in the "bad" parts of the library where
the pervs and would be hackers tend to loiter.
But the leasing and management company
said that model was still no good because
they couldn't activate the first clone they made
and they didn't understand why. I asked for them
to drop off the cloned PC so I can take a look
(aka see where they screwed up) but they have
dancing around doing this.
At this point, I'm more then a little bit annoyed.
The leasing and management company is also
some sort of Microsoft partner, but they are
obviously not very technical people at all despite
setting up large corporate networks being one of
their things.
Supposedly they are using Ghost to reimage.
Is there anything in the above sequence that
cause validation to not work? The managing and
leasing company now says they put the PC's
they reimaged back to factory condition so there's
nothing for me to look at. Are they just screw-ups?
Things are not getting done is the bottom line now.
Any thoughts will be appreciated.
-BC
IT staff and tech support can't resove a problem,
and by that time, people are pissy, angry and/or
defensive. Usually it's a highly technical problem,
and my latest "house call" involved creating a new
public access workstation model for a large public
library that's going from Win95 systems to Win
XP Pro. (Yeah, I know Win95 seems ancient, but
they had Firefox for web browsing, Office 97 for
letters and spreadsheets and such, 3rd party
security apps that really locked down the units,
and a simple, fast reimaging system that made
recovery from blown hard drives and such trivial.)
The only thing technically out of the ordinary was
that at one point years ago they wanted an easy
way to manage and control patron access to the
public worstations. After examiing and testing a
lot of library and cybercafe software, I picked this
cybercafe package by an English company. And
not only did the package rock, bur the software
made a couple of key mods to optimize it for
libary use. It ended being far more sophisticated
and less troublesome than typical much most
expensive and conventional library software.
So the library REALLY wanted to keep using this
cybercafe software for the new workstations, but
their tech staff had trouble figuring out how to do
that, and the tech support from the company
leasing and maintaining the PC's didn't know
anything about that stuff and didn't want to get
involved, and there were deadlines looming.... so I
get called in.
Getting the cybercafe software up and running was
actually pretty trivial -- they simply haven't had to
touch anything all these years, so they were still
using the old version, and weren't too sure about
the new one, blah, blah, blah. The only
complicating factor was deciding on the level of
desired security and how to control it: the cybercafe
software came with workstation security
management, a product called "Deep Freeze" that
they were also using also provides workstation
security, and good old, primitive Active Directory
Services would also be available to manage security
policies. Since Deep Freeze had the most robust
and slick security features (it creates a virtual
sandbox that make it seems like people have a lot
of access to the PC, but actually don't), it was
decided to use that plus a few features of the
cybercafe software to lock down the workstations.
Lastly, since I was working on a model PC that
would be imaged onto about 70 other workstation
PC's, I recommended wiping the retail image
off the PC and doing a clean install from scratch to
create a nice pristine model with all the latest
updates, and a complete, cover-all-bases, updated
program list, especially for multimedia. I knew that
the model and its clones will not be updated for
some time to come.
Wiping a PC and reinstalling from scratch is a
pretty basic thing. I've done it countless times.
Making a standard model PC and cloning/
reimaging that to identical new models is also
pretty basic as well, and I've done that plenty o'
times as well, including XP Pro systems. If you
have an install CD and a valid key, no big whoop.
But this is where my project developed a pile of
problems. I was told that there would be a volume
key for the PC's, but that never materialized --
instead the sticker key had to be used on the
model. Fine. But no CD's came with the HP's.
However you could create them, and these
weren't just image CD's but reinstallation ones.
OK, good. Made 2 sets of those. Good to go.
Wiped the hard drive and created a small 20Gb
partition (nobody will be saving things to the
hard drive, so they was no point to using the
entire drive, and then used the HP CD's to
install XP Pro. It looked like a normal install
but then it started asking for the CD already
inserted. Hmmm..not good. It got stuck in that
loop, so scratch that. Tried the other CD set.
Again normal but then it asked for an unknown
CD for verification -- WTF!? It figures -- the easy
part will be the hard part. Screw this, so I used
my VLK XP Pro SP2 CD I have for repairs to put
back the OS. Everything after that went as
expected.
But the company leasing and managing the
PC's then said that I did a bad thing -- the key
has to be the one on the sticker. They were
reminded that they were suppose to have
delivered a volume key, but .... Alright, fine.
Going from a VLK to an OEM is not that
complicated -- so I had the PC back to its
original sticker key and fully activated and
validated and good to go in about 45 minutes.
The leasing and management company takes
it away to reimage it to a small number of PC's
that were going to be used for initial testing,
especially in the "bad" parts of the library where
the pervs and would be hackers tend to loiter.
But the leasing and management company
said that model was still no good because
they couldn't activate the first clone they made
and they didn't understand why. I asked for them
to drop off the cloned PC so I can take a look
(aka see where they screwed up) but they have
dancing around doing this.
At this point, I'm more then a little bit annoyed.
The leasing and management company is also
some sort of Microsoft partner, but they are
obviously not very technical people at all despite
setting up large corporate networks being one of
their things.
Supposedly they are using Ghost to reimage.
Is there anything in the above sequence that
cause validation to not work? The managing and
leasing company now says they put the PC's
they reimaged back to factory condition so there's
nothing for me to look at. Are they just screw-ups?
Things are not getting done is the bottom line now.
Any thoughts will be appreciated.
-BC
