NCSU OIT Integration Services

Folks,

 I've moved the last remaining dregs from the "microsys" paging group and into "shs-general"  Most servers still in there were just waiting to be surplused and in non-production mode.

So this is a little late for the first blog entry given the amount of e-mail and face-to-face discussions going on in this topic, but XP SP3 breaks NDPS printing in a pretty horrible way.

In short, after installing a new ndps printer, it will work until the workstation is rebooted, at which point jobs will get spooled, but sit on the local machine forever, never reaching the server and certainly never printing.

After much anticpation, we have a new team member, Jonn Perry (jhperry).

I've added him to the "Windows Team" drupal role, so he can get full blog powers.

I got jealous of Kevin working on his project list by writing things down on his fancy-pants whiteboard, so I created a Projects Forum where we all could post potential projects for the team. 

 I'm starting with some simple to describe stuff that I don't want to forget about, so please don't read this as my priority list.

Here are the release notes for the "MinApps" kit, released August 2, 2008

The applications "Pidgin" and WinSCP are not installed in this image as originally intedned. Pidgin fails with an MSI 1602 error, and WinSCP tries to write to C:\ and won't install as a non-administrator. We'll fix these in the NAL.

There is a problem with IZArc in this image in that it tries to do a repair with any folder operation.  We'll remove this IZArc in the wolfprep script to correct this. 

To install this application, use

Had a nice chat with Everette today about NStream, an application that OSS is developing to deliver configuration information to Macintoshes.  With any luck, we'll be able to use this to replace the "FindLab.pl" currently used by WolfPrep to look up templates.

NStream currently tracks on IP and MAC addresses, so it should do better for machines behind a NAT firewall than FindLab.pl does.  We chatted about using regex's to search on machine name, and there may even be some synergy there.

There's some problems with the NoApps kit just released and VMWare, which possibly could catch other types of machines as well.

As part of the Sysprep preparation process, the machine has all of it's network adapters removed, so that when sysprep unpacks a new machine it can do a clean plug and play detection.  Unfortunately, the loopback adapter used by AFS is neither plug and play nor properly restored via the MSI self healing magic.

Release notes for "NoApps" kit

I've asked Tim to remove the windows-services jabber chat room, as since we've moved it hasn't served us as well as talking directly to each other.

If you are a Google Docs user, you can publish your documents to any of the Drupal blogs (integrate, xteams...). The nice thing is that when you update your Google doc, you can "republish" your post to the blog, updating it rather than creating a new one. You can also remove the post via Google Docs.

To configure Google Docs for this, open a document and from the Share menu choose "Publish as web page...." 

Choose the "change your blog settings" link. The settings you will  use are: