I'm running in to a few complications in my migration process. My main role has been a Linux / Sun administrator for 15 yrs so Windows server 2008 environment is a bit new to me, but understandable.

Here's our situation and reason for migrating...

We have a group of developers that develop VERY low-level software in Visual C with some inline assembler. All the workstations were separate from each other which cased consistency problems with development libraries, versions, etc...

Our goal was to throw them all on to a Windows domain were we can control workstation installations, hot fixes (which can cause enormous problems), software versions, etc... All Development Workstations are running Windows XP x32 (sp3) and x64 (sp2) I running in to user permission problems and I was wondering maybe I missed one, tWO or a handful of things during my deployment.

Here is what I have currently done:

1. Installed and Activated Windows Server 2008
2. Added Roles for DNS and Active Directory
3. Configured DNS with WINS for netbios name usage
4. Added developers to AD and mapped their shared folders to their profile
5. Added roles for IIS7 and configured the developers SVN
6. Installed MySQL Enterprise Edition for development usage

Not having a firm understanding of Group Policy I haven't delved deeply in to that realm yet.

Problems I'm encountering: 1. When I configure any XP workstations to logon our domain, once a user uses their new AD login, everything goes well, except they have very restrictive permissions. (Eg: If a user opens any existing file, they don't have write access, except in their documents folder.) Since these guys are working on low system level events, they need to r/w all files. All I'm looking to restrict in software installations.

1. Am I correct to assume that I can use WSUS to maintain the domains hot fixes and updates pushed to the workstations?

2. I need to map a centralized shared development drive upon the users login. This is open to EVERYONE. Right now I have the users folders mapped upon login through their AD profile. But how do I map a share if I've already defined one within their profile in AD?

Any responses would be very grateful.

1. Do I have to configure and define a group policy for the domain users?

2. Can I use Volume Mirroring to mirror / sync two drives on two separate servers or should I just script a rsync or MS Synctool? The drives simply store nightly system images.