Comments on: Episode 31 - Bye Bye Sysvol

by: rnason

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 00:45:36 +0000

In most of our districts that is the way we do it. DHCP assignes IP address and does not distribute the gateway, via disabling the router/gateway option in DHCP. We push IE and Firefox proxy settings via GPO so all traffic leaving the LAN has to go through the Proxy. This also averts any students bringing in portable browsers and bypassing the proxy. The proxy however does not allow any downloads, and in the district that I was working we are still using the Symantec Web Security web filter and that is not very administrator friendly. So in order to do updates and other downloads for building images, we will disable the proxy manually and assign the machine a gateway address so that it can reach the Internet. That is what I used active desktop for, to remind myself to manually remove the gateway settings prior to pushing the image up to the server. In order to accomidate administrators or sites that have an issue going through the proxy, we will either assign the static route option again through DHCP, and configure the proxy via the GPO to bypass the proxy for the specific sites. That will allow administrators or teachers the ability to get to the sites the proxy has an issue with without all together bypassing it. In other cases, such as for Domain Admins, we will assign DHCP reservations so that our laptops are unfiltered in the district, and we dont have to keep changing options.

by: David Wertz

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 00:25:49 +0000

Hi Guys!

I just started listening to your podcast and I really enjoy it. In this podcast you mentioned Small Business Server and the fact that you cannot have a backup domain controller. That is a common misconception but you can in fact have a backup domain controller.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/200866/EN-US/

Keep up the great work!

David Wertz

by: Greg Padberg

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 00:21:51 +0000

For the ““Using Active Desktop as Sticky? segment, isn’t DHCP being used to assign network settings for the workstations? Disabling the gateway / router option in DHCP seems to me the easiest and most sensible way of doing that.

Just last week I was considering this very setup, essentially requiring that all DHCP clients only access the external internet via the proxy and caching DNS server on the LAN. My networks are now set up in this way, so I may consider disabling the gateway / router option in DHCP eventually. Of course the servers and other network infrastructure are assigned static IP addresses so not having a DHCP-assigned gateway doesn’t matter anyway.

As an aside, the proxy config script has been updated to specify that workstations should attempt to access intranet resources directly, and if then unable to they should failover to using the proxy.

by: Matt Hull

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:55:42 +0000

feed://castingfromtheserverroom.com/podcast/?feed=comments-rss2

by: Jed

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 19:49:27 +0000

Is there an RSS feed for all comments?

by: Matt Hull

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 23:28:40 +0000

Sorry for the poor audio quality. My laptop hard drive died so I replaced it and reinstalled the OS. I guess I have to tweek the settings some more. Stick with us, next week should be improved.