SO here are some things I learned while staging my school for the upcoming year.

1. Make sure you have every single update, every upgrade, and every single tweak already installed and humming on your PC BEFORE you push the image to the network.
2. This includes an admin account.
3. But leave out printers. It seems like a good idea at first to include printers at first. Disabling them after the fact is as simple as manually installing them after the fact. but my user have taught me that they can not be trusted with access to other printers. Paper is a hot commodity these days. When a printer goes down, one person may hijack another printer - just ‘temporarily’. Then they forget. Then they send the same job over, and over, and over… wasting reams of paper. Then they call me and I ask them why they’re connected to a printer in another building.
4. Buy the largest switch you can find and then 4 - 5 smaller 5 port switches. Gather all your PCs for a room into a small spot. Daisey Chain them together with cheap surge protectors and image them this way.

   I know your IT Head prolly wants to push his image from the top down. This seems like it would be the best idea. This is a bad idea. I tried it. My VLANS are all eff’d up. Zen doesn’t play well across Vlans, so I ended up having to image individual computers in individual classrooms anyways.

5. DO everything locally. The first time I pushed an image to 500 PCs, it was from the patch board. This killed every connection on that floor. Every printer went down. I got stopped by 10 different people before I realized what had caused the network to slow to a crawl.
6. Screw your end users - don’t deviate to fix anything until your imaging is done. Just today, I set a classroom to run unattended and left for 5 minutes to fix a printer in another building. Some a-hole came along and picked up my 25 port switch freezing up half the class. I was late 2 hours after work redoing that s%hit.

Tomorrow I get to spend the day creating print objects and figuring out why my Xerox machines aren’t playing nice on my network.

YAY!