Google Earth is a great program for schools, as it allows teachers and students to explore the worlds geography and use layers to examine history, socio-economic information and many other areas.
It used to be fairly easier to deploy on your network, but after version 4.2 it became significantly more difficult if you use a deployment program like Zenworks. A new MSI test was introduced to determine where to install Google Earth. If the current user is not an Admin User it would redirect to [LocalAppDataFolder]Google\Google Earth (usually C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Earth) which made it inaccessible to other users.
As Zenworks uses the System account, which is not an admin user, this would happen when the installer was launched by a student.
To fix this problem there are a few different techniques. You can use either ORCA or Admin Studio Tuner (from Zenworks) to create a transform file that ignores these checks. Alternatively you can use ORCA to edit the msi file directly, I had to use this technique for V5 due to some exisiting problems in the Google Earth MSI.
First download the full version of Google Earth, (V5.0.11337). You should be able to find later versions through Google.
To find what you need to edit you can do a search in ORCA for AdminUser you should find around 3 entries.
The major entries are:
InstallExecuteSequence: ChangeInstallDirForNonAdmin: NOT AdminUser (Delete this row)
InstallExecuteSequence: setALLUSERS: AdminUser (remove the word AdminUser so it applies to all installs)
InstallUISequence: ChangeInstallDirForNonAdmin: NOT AdminUser (Delete this row)
You may also wish to remove AdminUser as a Condition from Component: Plus_Registry_wavdest.ax
Once these are removed or modified it should install in C:\Program Files\Google\Google Earth regardless of which user is logged in.
We are gradually migrating our core services from Novell Netware to Windows Server 2003 and 2008. As part of this migration we needed to migrate all our DHCP reservations stored on our Novell servers to Windows Servers.
First a comment, although Microsoft seems to have a much better DNS system than on Netware 6.5, their DHCP implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
On Novell I could create a scope, reservations and options and it is stored in eDirectory. I could then have multiple DHCP servers with different IP ranges to offer. I could use the java console (sometime slow) to add a reservation and it would sync to both servers.
On Windows Server 2003 and 2008 I need to separate create scopes, allocation ranges and reservations on each server. Their is no synchronisation or communication between these servers. This means to migrate my reservations from my current Netware DHCP servers to the target Windows servers the reservations need to be added to each server, as well as adding any future reservations to both servers.
Migration Process
First use the Novell DNS/DHCP console and export the DHCP scope / database you are migrating.
I have written the following Perl code to read in the DHCP3TAB file generated and output a netsh file that will add all your reservations to any number of Windows DHCP servers.
You will need to modify the DHCP servers list to your AD servers and change the scopeName to the correct IP settings.
After running your DHCP3TAB through the perl script, copy output to your server and run netsh exec outputFile.txt to add it to your servers.
[code='perl']
#!C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe
# Designed to read in Rservations from a Novell DHCP Tab file and output a NetSH script file
# From http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787375.aspx
# On the destination server, the exec command is used to load and execute the converted reservations:
# netsh exec AdReservations.txt
# After you use the exec command to load the file, you must reconcile all scopes.
# Use net stop dhcpserver to stop the DHCP Server service and net start dhcpserver to restart it. Once the service is restarted, DHCP database changes take effect.
use strict; use warnings;
my $dhcptabName = "DHCP3TAB.txt";
my $outFile = "AdReservations.txt";
my @dhcpServers = ('\\\\DHCPServer1.win.us.schools.nsw.edu.au',
'\\\\DHCPServer2.win.us.schools.nsw.edu.au');
my $scopeName = "10.10.11.0";
open F, "< $dhcptabName" or die "Can't open $dhcptabName : $!";
open O, "> $outFile" or die "Can't open $outFile : $!";
# File parsing
my $ip;
my $host;
my $mac;
my $type;
my $comment="";
while (my $line = ){
if ($line =~ /^\[IP Address Configuration /i) {
# New entry, clear values
$ip="", $host="", $mac="", $type="", $comment="";
while ((my $entry = ) !~ /^$/){
# Parse and fill in values
if ($entry =~ /IP Address Number = ([\d.]+)/i){
$ip=$1;
}
elsif ($entry =~ /Assignment Type = (\d+)/i){
$type=$1;
}
elsif ($entry =~ /Host Name = ([\w\-_]+)/i){
$host=$1;
}
elsif ($entry =~ /MAC Address = 1 (.+)/i){
$mac=$1;
$mac=~ s/\s+//g;
}
elsif ($entry =~ /Comment = (.+)/i){
$comment=$1;
}
}
# If type != 8 (reservation) discard
next unless ($type == 8);
next if ($mac eq "" or $ip eq "" or $host eq "");
foreach my $server (@dhcpServers){
print O "Dhcp Server $server Scope $scopeName Add reservedip $ip $mac \"$host\" \"$comment\" \"BOTH\"\n";
}
}
}