Day 4: Backup Successful

(Hours: 7:30am-5:00pm)

Today was a rather less eventful day that my previous ones, mainly because I wasn’t running around everywhere. Again I started my day off opening and turning on the Library and Tech department. After that I headed over to David’s office and worked on a few final aspects of my image computer. There was a problem with the sound tool bar not showing up and it ended up being a problem with the installed audio drivers. I had to get the XP install cd and ran a few command lines to get it back. Once that was fixed I restarted and booted up into Acronis.

Acronis is the disk imaging software, what it basically does is backs up and recovers PC systems. Once you make an image (copy) of the computer, it can be replicated many times onto other machines. The actual software is fairly simple, and the image was created in about a half an hour. Once it finished it was uploaded to a server, where other machines can remotely copy and image from.

I then went on to fixing the conflicts Adobe CS3 caused on the two new HP machines. The installer for CS3 ended up putting Apple’s bonjour, a device discovery tool, on the computer. Bonjour has complications in Windows 7, so it had to be disabled. Once Bonjour was disabled, the computer connected to the network fine and everything seemed to work fine. Both machines were finished and I boxed them back up.

The last thing I worked on today was on a computer that I imaged, using the image I made from the Acronis program earlier in the day. The image worked fine and everything ran as it should. Since some of these computers are going to be put into labs, I needed to figre out a way to automatically delete user accounts that were no longer needed. What I ended up using was a simple program provided by Microsoft called Delprof. Delprof is a command-line utility that you can use to delete user profiles on a local or remote computer. The program itself isn’t automated the way we wanted to so we needed to find a way around that.

I ended up finding a script that can be run at shutdown that will run the delprof utility in the background. Originally we wanted delprof to delete profiles on log-off, but the student profiles wouldn’t have sufficient privileges to run the utility, so we settled for shutdown. I used a simple .vbs script that we modified to run once a month. The script was placed in the windows folder and User Policy editor was used to place it in a shutdown script. In the end the script worked and the local user profiles were deleted at shutdown.

Post time: 6:52pm est.