Need help with Active Directory

blade_146 · Post by **blade_146** » Thu Aug 27, 2009 6:51 am

Hey guys, I have some major issues going on at work that I need some help with. Let me give you the history on it. I work in in IT dept for the local school district encompassing 9 schools in all. I'm the pc tech/network in training guy. Up until last week its just been me and the Sys Admin to handle the whole district. Last Friday he quit and its all in my lap until they get a replacement for him.

We have been running a strictly Novell environment but in Feb. of this year we bought an IBM blade center to start phasing out the old servers and migrate to Server 08. Currently we have 3 blades set up and 4 of our schools will be on Windows. Now the server has been on site for 7 months now but the boss just decided to set up the blades and about 3 weeks so nothing has been tested. I had asked for months if we could get it going and start testing accounts and policies before school started back but hell..I dont get paid to think logically apparently. So we lit her up 3 weeks ago, then he leaves and this things is driving my nucking futs!!

I'm currently pursuing an AS in networking so I've had some experience with AD and group policies in class. First off I dont think he has the directory set up properly. It seems way over complicated for what we need. Heres an example of how the dir is laid out:

Kenton School-OU
Administration-OU
Student-OU
Office-OU
Teacher-OU
Then user accounts in those.

But hell mostly we have teachers and students. Office personnel only consists of a few people. We had problems setting GP's to the OU's, especially students so I made a single student OU with 4 user accounts under that for the 4 schools. I came up with some GP's for the students and applied that to the Student OU and those push out fine.

I cannot for the life of me get any GP's for the teachers to work properly now matter where I link them. The teachers need local admin access on their machines and I've tried everything I know to get that to work but it just won't. Granted I dont scripting and what not yet but surely you can apply something to give them what they need.

Another problem is folder redirection. We have a VM file server set up through HyperV that stores the users folder and we want to redirect My documents to their home directory but that doesnt work either.

And finally how the hell do you get a print server to work with 08? Its 64 bit datacenter edition and I can get a printer to install on the server but it only wants to load the 64 bit driver so when I try to install that printer on a 32 bit XP machine it tells me the server doesn't have the correct driver. The passed 2 weeks have been the most stressful of my life because I want to show the powers that be that I can do this too. I know Im not out of school yet and I dont know everything but I have a chance to show them something but Im hitting a wall. Can anyone help me please???!!!
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Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Aug 27, 2009 8:24 am

Afraid I can't help you with AD but I can help with the printer server.

In all previous versions of Windows server (and I assume 2008) you can get into the printer's properties and in the "Sharing" tab there is a button called "Additional Drivers". This opens a dialog that allows you to install additional drivers for other operating systems so that the server will automatically upload the driver to the workstation during install. Needless to say you need to have the drivers handy - I would recommend that for most printers you download the "Basic print driver" from the website.

The alternative is to have the basic drivers handy in a folder on the workstation PC and when the workstation tells you it can't install the driver from the server you will have the option of browsing for them from another location.

blade_146 · Post by **blade_146** » Thu Aug 27, 2009 8:42 am

FP, every time I try to add the 32 bit driver to the server it tells it cant because I need the 64 bit one, although it's already on there. And I thought about putting the drivers on a jump drive but I figured if we have this nice big server we might as well use it and let it do it's thing. I just have to figure it out. It's driving me crazy but I'm learning a lot and the more I get stumped the more I want to figure it out.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Aug 27, 2009 8:49 am

You don't have a dialog like this? This is from Server 2003:

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Aug 27, 2009 8:52 am

See if this helps:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 32946.aspx

blade_146 · Post by **blade_146** » Thu Aug 27, 2009 2:14 pm

I have one printer that I was able to add the 32 bit driver with like the screen you showed above but we have 2 other printers in the teacher work areas that will install in the 32 bit no matter what.

b-man1 · Post by **b-man1** » Wed Sep 16, 2009 10:22 pm

i'm late to the game on this one, but for what it is worth...

i'd say 90%+ of group policy problems i've encountered were due to conflicts with other GPOs, either on the same OU or higher in the tree. remember the LDSOU rule for how GPOs are applied, then walk through each GP from the top down to see if one is stepping on what you ultimately need. if you haven't, install the Group Policy Editor, rather than the built-in editor on the server you are managing the GPOs from...it's easier to see what's going on then.

i'm sure you have done all the usual searching, but here is an old technet article on folder redirection: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... S.10).aspx

same thing for the redirection...make sure the order of the policies is correct, you are using the proper admin template (user vs computer policy), etc.