In Windows 2000 and NT4 SP3 Microsoft included an option to enable a cryptographic integrity mechanism, SMB Signing, to prevent active network taps from hijacking an established NetBIOS session. As it was an optional security setting it was rarely enabled in Windows 2000/NT4 networks but, in Windows 2003 this feature is enabled by default and it will prevent the SchoolSuite Network Boot Disk from connecting to the network share that disk images are downloaded from.

This option will need to be disabled, temporarily at least, for boot disks to be used on a Windows 2003 network. There is also a performance cost attached to having this feature enabled that schools may want to evaluate in terms of risk v performance. More details can be found in our 'Using network boot disks with Windows 2003' article.