Hi all, I work in an educational environment. Running Netware 5.1 servers to serve over a 100 PC's in classrooms. My life was very easy since I employed Deepfreeze on Win9x workstations and allowing users to save their data only on their Netware Home directories. No desktop clutter, no need to clean up messy cache and local folders on the workstations. I avoided saving money on Zenworks as ours is a NPO. Now I wanna shift over to Win2K. Haven't yet acquired Deepfreeze for Win2K license. Doesn't wanna allow users/students to mess around with desktops or dump anything locally. Wanna set Autologout time on novell when user doesn't do anything on the machine for say (30 minutes). What's the best way to go about without any Third Party s/w. I have explored the case of creating only one user locally,making him a member of User predefined group, giving this guy autologin previleges while making him manually logon to NDS. The idea looks promising but does anyone knows any loopholes in this?

First off Windows 2000 can be inherently insecure. If you have a local user that is autologged on as a member of a predefined group, and you have a few rather clever students with access to l0pht utilities it won't be long before you have a few clever students with Administrator privilages in windows (not netware). It can be harder for students to do this through proper NT security and policies. I really think you should look at Zenworks for Desktops 4, as the policies and features you can enact with it make deep freeze fairly obsolete. Zenworks allows you to have dynamic users. A student logs in it creates a matching account on the workstation with whatever privilages you setup ahead of time. User, Power User, Guest etc.. The user system settings are all configurable with policies. User logs out it deletes the account of that user. It adds some amount of time to logins, but in my experience has proved most effective at keeping systems consistent and untampered with. If you really wanted to keep things in an unaltered state you could setup imaging (either Zenworks imaging or a Norton Ghost solution) that would automatically reimage computers on restart. Any changes a student made are instantly lost, but there is a 15 minute or so (depending on your image size) delay in reboot. That is a most draconian policy however. Ryan Kather