[OPLINTECH] USB Drives

[dave menninger]

Hello OPLINTECH,

I'm long time reader, first time poster.  I'm in the Computer Services
department at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.  We've
recently been having big problem cropping up with USB drives on our public
devices for our patrons to use.  So my request here is a two-parter.  First
I'm interested in what other libraries are doing.  Second, I'd be interested
to hear if anyone has some ideas on troubleshooting this specific problem
we're having.

How many of you are allowing patrons to use their own USB drives on the
public PCs and is there anything special you do to allow this?

Here's the problem we're having:  We have recently been rolling out a large
number of new computers and they're set up differently than anything we've
put out before.  When we build the machines and test them, USB flash drives
work perfectly.  After some unknown about of time after putting them out in
the public - on the scale of days to weeks - they get to the point where
inserting USB drive brings up the Found New Hardware Wizard.  This in turn
brings up a box asking for an administrator password since you must be
administrator to install new devices.  This whole process makes it
impossible for patrons to use USB drives.  An interesting thing is that if
you put in an administrator's credentials and follwo through the wizard, it
claims that the device driver is unsigned and you have to tell it to
continue anyway.  It's not clear to us what could cause this behavior to
crop up on a machine where it initially was working just fine.

Here's a little more background on the machines:  They're Windows XP,
they're imaged using Altiris Deployment Console, they have CleanSlate,
they're on a Windows domain and have domain users, the users have no roaming
profile.  Let me know what other info might be relevant.

Finally, I'll say thanks in advance for any feedback that anyone out there
might have.  We'd really appreciate it since we're feeling a bit stumped by
this right now.

Thanks!

Dave Menninger
PC Specialist
The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
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