CD Burning for Power Users in XP

What happens when you've got non-Administrator users (like Power Users) that need to burn CD's under Windows XP? It must be group policy setting, but where? I went over the local group policies with a fine tooth comb and couldn't find the "Allow Non-Admnistrator users to burn CD's" settings. There are a lot of crazy ideas floating around the internet about how to make this work and most of them don't work. But, I did come across 2 (or 3, depending on how you look at it) working solutions.

I actually first encountered this problem some time ago, but the problem recently reappeared. I couldn't find my original notes on how to fix it so I turned to Google, armed with a vague idea of the solution and found the answer within a few minutes. Now I'm making notes for all the world to see and hopefully, this post will be of help to someone else.

The first solution, and seemingly more popular one on the internet, is to use a small application from the makers of the Nero called Nero BurnRights (you can find it here http://www.nero.com/enu/support-nero6-tools-utilities.html ). You can install and configure it by hand if you want, but it's easier to automate it with a script or batch file. There are a few command line switches to help out. The switches I liked were: /silent and/burnrights:all. That sets everyone up to be able to burn and makes the installation silent so it doesn't interrupt anyone while it runs. There's only one catch, you have to be an administrator to run the installer. Otherwise the installer craps out (silently, of course) and it doesn't actually install anything.

Now, I don't have Nero installed on every computer, a lot of them run InfraRecorder. This problem shows up in InfraRecoder as the program launching but not being able to see any available burners. It seemed to be overkill to have to install one application to make another application run so I wanted a better and easier solution. Where's that simple group policy setting or registry key that fixes this problem? Obviously if one group (Administrators) can burn and another group (Power Users) cannot burn then it has to be a fairly simple rights issue. I worked off and on for several days when I stumbled upon the solution in an unlikely place. Over at AppDeploy.com I was looking at some of the configuration settings for the Nero suite ( http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=627 ) and I found in the notes section that TheWorkz had answered my questions:

I have found instead of using Nero Burn Rights for user rights to Low Level Device Access in Windows XP, you can use the following registry key/Policy to enable users rights to CD Drives.

Registry Key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
"allocatecdroms"="1"

OR

Group Policy
Policy: Local Policy > Security Options
"Devices: Restrict CD-ROM Access to Locally logged-on users only" = Enabled

There it was, as simple as that (imho a lot easier that the BurnRights solution listed above). I'd seen that group policy setting before, but my logic had been flawed. I had incorrectly assumed that I needed less restriction instead of more. One might argue that if you apply "Microsoft logic" that it all makes perfect sense. Whatever the case, changing this setting works.

You might be saying, "Come on! Still battling with Windows XP?" This is 2009 and we all know Windows Vista has been out for a while and Windows 7 is right around the corner. But this is practical school tech, and for all practical purposes Windows XP is going to be around for a while in public education. I've got Windows 98 machines still floating around and I know of school systems that have gotten rid of their last Windows 3.11 machines in just the past few years. If it upsets you that your children are using really old computers at school, call any politician that you know and tell them that more money needs to go to technology in education. In this economy they may laugh at you, but once the economy turns around it might help. It can't hurt can it?

Practical School Technology

There's an interesting read on Jack Wallen's blog over at TechRepublic about the adoption of open source software in schools. It sparked a lot of discussion, but I guess any time you ask, "Why aren't insert-any-organizations adopting open source?" you're bound to get a lot of discussion.

There were comments from a very diverse group of people. A lot of suggestions were made, some good and some bad. But there were a lot of seemingly good ideas that just are not practical for public education. I thought about replying to some of the comments but I couldn't decide where I wanted to start. So I came up with the idea of starting this blog. A blog about more than just the who/what/when/where/why of adopting open source software in public education, but a blog about lessons learned in dealing with technology and public education, a blog about practical users of technology in education. I invite you guys to join me with comments so we can make this a great place to find ideas for things that work.