SUS Question with XP home editions machines not on the domain.

[Newf !!!]

University Setting. We have mostly a 2003/winxp pro network. We are
using SUS.

Campus is divided into two types of computers. 1 group being staff
machines on campus. Another group being student personal machines
that stay in residence just outside of campus but are connected to our
network for internet access. Most of which are WinXP Home edition. The
student machines are the ones I am concerned with right now. The staff
machines update fine.

I'll call the students machines, residence machines.

Every semester we get new students needing to get on the network to
get internet access. This is where the problem starts. these machines
are never up to date, and the second the go online, we get nailed with
virus's, and the network slows to a crawl until virus's are gone. We
need a way to have the students update their machines without relying
on the internet connection and ideally using the SUS server to save on
much needed internet BW.

These machines we do not have access to. They simply have an ip on our
network. some students may be smart enough to make sure the workgroup
is the same as ours, but honestly we need a method that is idiot
proof.

We thought about making a reg file that would change their registry to
point to our sus server for updates. Killer is once they import that
registry key, all works fine on campus, but when they go home for the
summer, those machines will still be trying to connect to our nework.
So we thought, make a 2nd registry key that they click on to set
things back to normal, but to be honest, we have zero faith in our
students remembering to do this.

Ideally, I'd like some sort of bat file, or client tool, or even a
command lline based thing that they could run when they need to update
windows. This tool would connect to our server, get the updates as
needed. This was solve everything, but I don't know of such a tool? or
even a web based option, where they go to our web page instead of the
microsoft one

is there one?

 

[Ken B]

I'm pretty sure that you can't push a policy to an XP Home machine. I think
the best solution you would have would be to download the individual updates
yourself, set up an intranet site where the students could click a link
(sort of checklist format) and install the update. Keep going down the list
'til you reach the end.

I think at my school (when I was going they instituted a laptop policy after
I started), that you had to buy such and such laptop, with XP Pro, yadda
yadda. They had a deal going with Dell I think. I'm not sure what came of
that, but they may have had the students join a sub-domain so the machines
on the network would continually get Windows updates as needed from an
on-site SUS server instead of using a 2-bit T.

I don't know your budget or capabilities, but I would also be concerned
about a virus package. Perhaps purchasing a site license for either Norton
or McAfee (or whatever your pleasure) and make it available free for the
students to use. Put that at the top of the aforementioned patch
checklist.... and configure it ahead to automagically update once a day or
something from an on-site definition repository. But that may be getting
too far into politics and budgetary constraints.

HTH... have a good weekend

Ken