Topic: Best way to implement automatic diff'ed imaging?

[mscdex]

I am currently in the process of redoing a network for a local school. So far it seems SME Server does everything I'd need to do, except I can't figure out one thing. What is the best way to make it so that when a user boots the computer, it is efficiently imaged so that if a student had installed software locally, it would no longer be there? I know you can assign changes using policies, but those won't uninstall any (unnecessary) user-installed software on the local machine. I thought maybe there might be a way to somehow have an (win2k) image on the server for a certain group of machines (say, for a single computer lab), such that when they boot, a "diff" of sorts is used to determine ONLY the files need to be overwritten or removed or added to the local hard disk without imaging the whole image. One of the problems I'd think would occur though with the images is, certain things in Windows would need to be changed appropriately since the image would be used for an entire group (e.g. computer lab), such as unique hostname, etc.

I believe something similar to this is done at my own university, where they are using Novell (Netware, ZENworks) products to accomplish this task (any installed programs are completely gone after reboot). Is something like this possible or available for SME Server?


EDIT: I've decided the best way to handle the situation is to use something like Deep Freeze instead of having the server deliver an image to each workstation when they boot. Feel free to close this thread. Sorry for any disruptions.

[mmccarn]

I know one college network admin who does this using Norton Ghost.

Each system has a local partition on its hard drive with a backup of the particular system's default configuration; he runs a task nightly from his Ghost management console that tells all student-accessible PCs to re-image themselves and reboot...

[CharlieBrady]

What is the best way to make it so that when a user boots the computer, it is efficiently imaged so that if a student had installed software locally, it would no longer be there?

I don't see that your question has anything to do with SME server. You are just asking a question about Windows workstation administration.

[mscdex]

I don't see that your question has anything to do with SME server. You are just asking a question about Windows workstation administration.

I was asking if this (automated) functionality was possible with SME Server