Thin-Clients

Well, since our current solution for mapping printers is an ugly batch file, which needs to be put into Startup, I today poked at doing it in VBscript (I know, but it’s less ugly than the batch script, trust me). As some of you know, printers are only applicable to users (as in you can’t put a startup script onto an OU, which is going to map the printers). So as we store users and the computes in different OU’s in our Active Directory (we do have about 15.000 students), I can’t apply the printer.vbs to the users OU directly either, unless I implement some intelligence into the script itself. ...

We’re currently having a weird issue (which we had before); the Windows XP Embedded powering our Wyse V90’s isn’t applying any GPO settings if you log on with a user that has a configured profile. Googling (is that a valid word yet ?!) for it, only resulted in one useful link, which is apparently a guy with the exact same problem … 🤷 I’m completely out of ideas by now, as I don’t even have a place to start (as in where the reason might be located). ...

Well, as I said in my previous post, I do have some weird things happening. Apparently adding the domain user to the local group “Administrators” makes everything just works fine, yet he can’t do administrator like stuff (like turning off the write protection, changing local user accounts, …). Also, if you’re looking for a smart way of how to add a certain global group (as in Active Directory group) to a local group, try this: ...

As I posted earlier, I tried working around some limitations in Microsoft’s Active Directory by teaching the script some intelligence. But, since we recently started using Thin Clients, all the stuff I did with the fancy vbs was just a waste-of-time. Turns out, Windows XP Embedded doesn’t work quite the same as a " normal" Windows XP (that’s where I tested the script on), and it simply dies when running the WMI Query. Bollocks. ...

OK, so about an hour (yeah, yeah; I know .. I shouldn’t be working at that time, but it really gave me sleepless nights) ago, I finally figured out why the hell both my Windows XP Embedded thin clients as well as my Windows Server 2003 systems where showing this real weird behaviour when applying group policies, or more precise the user based configuration of a group policy. ...

As some of you know, the company I’m currently working for, recently acquired some thin clients to replace our old computers for the students to work on. Those PC’s are like P3 800 MHz with 512MB RAM and sadly don’t run Office 2007 anymore, so we replaced them with thin clients and are streaming those applications from a Windows Terminal Server cluster (created by and with 2X Application LoadBalancer). So far so good, getting them to display the applications ain’t hard, the real hard part starts when you want additional things from this Windows XPe (Embedded), like lets say getting them to display a German language. ...