One of my colleagues has asked me if it's possible to set up a web page which will map student's personal network folder and printers when they log in via their personal laptop. We're using Win 2003 servers and IIS 6, currently have an Intranet up and running. Currently, when students log into school machines their personal folder: \\servername\ourstudents\yeargroup\student Is mapped to N:\ for that session. Printers, although a shared resource, are allocated to machines rather than people. I suggested using FTP on IIS to give users access to their personal folders, but my colleague has been looking at linking \\servername\ through Internet Explorer. Clicking on the link prompts users to log in (taking info from the Active Directory) but it then shows every shared folder on the server regardless of whether the student should have access to it or not. As kids like nothing better than attempt to haxxzor the school network, I think the system should be a little tighter than that. Since software cannot be installed on student's machines, tunnels are right out. It also has to be incredibly simple and free to implement. (The department's budget this year is £0 ) Personally, if we can just give users access to their home directory from a personal laptop, I think it'll be good enough. So if anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.
Sounds like you really need terminal services. Am I right in thinking you want access to everything via a webpage or use the webpage as a login method (to authenticate the user then run a logon script)? If you want to access via a webpage then you could setup internet printing on the servers to enable people to map to printers from a webpage. You could also use sharepoint to store your files & use it to create personal area for the students. This is all free. If you want to use the webpage for authentication then you'll run in to errors launching logon scripts etc due to the personal machines not being on the domain (workaround-able though). Personally I'd put TS in to next years budget. As a school the licenses are really cheap so it shouldn't cost too much to implement.
Thanks, we'll have a look at those. I think internet printing could be done right away, but it's something to play with.
