OverWorked

I've used Sophos on our school network for several years now and have mixed opinions about it. In the central management console, loads of machines are reporting Sophos AV errors, but it's difficult to do anything about it without going to the machine and manually reinstalling Sophos. Last year we had a serious virus infection running on a staff laptop and a server. Sophos detected it, but did nothing about it, causing me to stay behind for hour one evening to perform an off line Sophos AV scan to clean the server. When disinfecting home systems, several time I've seen the free AVG find viruses Sophos has missed. (This was a few years ago, though). I found this thread because I'm looking for a decent AV for a charity I support. Theres no consensus on a good enterprise AV solution. I'm using Eset Smart Security at home, it's OK, but can't get it to play properly with home networking (have to restart it to allow ICS, and it's blocking iTunes sharing on a friend's network, despite being told not to). I've given up on F-Secure and Zone Alarm at home for poor performance (typically taking 5 mins. for the PC to be usable after booting). There seems to be more comments in favour of NOD32, so I'll look into that. Does it have a central management console?

If you're starting a list, then thin clients is the hot potato on my desk at the moment.

While we're on the subject of barcodes, how do you print them? What software do you recommend? As cheap as possible.

Speak to ICTNUT. He's produced My Little Helpdesk, which I think may soon include a bar code reader (if I understood correctly in my conversation with him at BETT on Thursday). I use MLH for my private IT support business, and can highly recommend it. Tell him I sent you!

Voluntary work is definitely the right thing to do. It gives you experience and shows willing. Paper certs can't do either of these for you. You sound like you're in the same position I was 7 years ago. Stuck in dull office job and wanting to get into IT. I went for 16 interviews in 9 months, before a local school offered to let me do voluntary IT support. That swung it at the next interview with another local school and I got the job (easily, I was told later). Seven years later, and I'm still there, and enjoying it.

John, I'd have gone by train if I'd got organised earlier and got the cheap deals. There are cloakrooms at Olympia - £1 per item, so stuff everything in one bag if you can. Also: get something to eat and drink before you go in, and take bottled water. The food prices there are astronomical, although Pizza Express was reasonably priced. Have a good time.

I got:- Riso (G121): Traditional wooden pencil case with crayons and sharpener. Also chocolates and pens. PC Advisor (Q48): Educate IT mag with articles by EduGeek staff. Also got from Edugeek. PC World (F60): water & Samsung post-its. nlearning (G125): water Smoothwall: Innocent Smoothies Protape (L20): Sony calendar. EduGeek: bag of stuff.

I had a great time, but by 2:00 thursday I'd suffered information overload and had to retire to a small pub near Charing Cross. Great to meet everyone again at the stand on Thursday. I came by a couple of times on Wednesday, but everyone had their heads buried in their laptops. Got to meet Ozan, who provides a great service with My Little Helpdesk. I'm a customer and use it for my small IT support business. My customers like it too. Thanks for the pizza on Thursday. It kept me going. Thanks to Smoothwall for the smoothies. One for being a customer and one for answering the questionnaire. (I've only just got that BTW, Smoothwall - Smoothie, I'm slow sometimes). Spoke to the ladies on the stand, but didn't get to speak to Tom or Gavin, they were way too busy flogging their service. Wanted to speak to the Cutter guy about thin clients, but couldn't get hold of him. This was my first time at BETT. See you again next year.

Just plugged it in and tried it. Great. Very funny ... and useful too.

We need some freebies to make up for the prices of the food at Olympia. This afternoon I paid £3 for a coffee, then later £5 for a smoothie at Crussh opposite EduGeek. The coach from Leeds was cheaper. As I'm writing this I'm with relatives in London, so I'm getting a packed lunch for tomorrow. Lots of genuinely interesting sales pitches, but no freebies yet, apart from the EduGeek goodie bag. What's the USB thing in the white box? Haven't had chance to look at it yet.

I'm just going through the floorplan and planning my trip now. I've not been before and I'm looking forward to it. How did EduGeek and Smoothwall get adjacent stands? And so close to the Cafe Grand?

I'll be there Weds & Thurs. I'm having to travel by National Express bus (from Leeds), as we can't afford the train. The Head told me not to spend any money whilst there. Fortunately I can spend the night at my in-laws in London. See you there!

The free beta is ending in February 2009. After which it's $660 per year. I don't think I'll be using it at that price. I've been using it occasionally, for my self-employed small business, over the past year but it's not worth paying that. Beta testers get a 30% discount (reducing the price to about £300 + VAT), and there's still time to register. Link below:- http://www.gotoassist.com/s/betafriends

Thanks matt40k. I didn't try delprof. Does deleting the profile with delprof also delete the user's files in the offline files folder? I didn't know it did. Anyway: I gave her another laptop for other staff who use the room, and told here to keep her own laptop to herself. Not an ideal solution and was only possible because I had a redundant laptop. I found out the quick way of resetting the offline files cache in MS KB 230738, though. It's also mentioned here in EduGeek. I cleared up 20GB instantly, and greatly speeded up the laptop.

My laptop used their router for DNS (obtained from the router's DHCP service), and it worked well. There wasn't any difference between their computer's and my laptops IP settings. Thanks anyway. @Quackers: that's worth a try when I go back. Thanks.

Hello, I was at a friend's house last night, after they said their new PC couldn't access the internet. I found that it can't resolve DNS. IPConfig shows everything is correct: valid IP, with DHCP server and DNS server pointing to the router. Both IE and Firefox can access web pages through an IP address, but entering a domain name URL give the DNS error page. DNS Client service is running. Plugged my laptop into the router and internet browsing works perfectly. It's a second hand PC with XP Home COA sticker, but the system restore CD is missing. If the CD turns up, I'll just wipe and reinstall XP. I fixed another strange problem on it a few weeks ago, so I think it's just a corrupt OS or virus damaged. I haven't seen this before. Any ideas?

In addition to what Friez said:- You need two files: the batch file and the list of machines. batch file (just one line):- for /f %%a in (all_computers.txt) do ping -n 1 %%a | find "Reply" && shutdown /s /m \\%%a -t 60 text file 'all_computers.txt' (a list of computer names):- ict00 ict01 ict02 ict03 ict04 ict05 ict06 ict07 ict08 Run the batch file from a server as a scheduled task with domain admin credentials. Having said that, it doesn't always shut down every computer, and doesn't seem to affect the one Vista machine I have.

Michael, I've already got these set. They prevent network browsing by other methods, but still allow it through browsing the start menu folder. I suppose that disabling the Windows Explorer context menu would prevent this, but I wanted to avoid doing that. Thanks anyway. @mark - looking at the time of your post, you should enable your sleep option! How do you do it?

Thanks, Nick. I know that AD integration for Linux-based storage boxes has improved a lot recently. Next time I buy one I'll check more thoroughly.

That approach worked. I've set the local security on the box to protect the shares with an account with the same username and password as the domain account that Backup Exec runs under. Funny thing is, I'm sure I tried that weeks ago and couldn't get it to work. Anyway, it's working now... Another thing: from XP, I can browse the shares on the Terastation using the new credentials, but if I browse from Vista, it insists on adding the domain name to the username, so the Terastation denies access. It's working, so can't grumble about that. BTW, the Terastation is housed in a secure location way down the other end of the school, so it's physically secure. I can sleep easy over Christmas now, knowing that my backups are safe.

@ssiruuk2: I think I've read somewhere of others doing this - it may be the best option. I'll look into it. @mark: That's one option, but not that secure. It might also stop extra long backup jobs running. @Michael: That was my original approach: security by obscurity. I always knew it was open but thought that it was impossible to find. I recently had a shock when I found that they can browse the network. All they do is right click 'all programs' in that start menu and explore. Because their start menu is redirected, they can browse all the shares on the network. I've secured all Windows shares, but can't do it for the Linux-based NAS. Anyone know of a GP setting to stop this?

Hello, I use a Buffalo Terastation as a backup-to-disk NAS device. Trouble is it's open to everyone. Anyone who found it could delete the backup files. The Terastation AD integration is very poor, so can't secure it that way. I wanted to secure it by connecting it to a Windows box and use AD security to control access. The easiest option would have been to use USB to connect it to the PC and use it as a shared USB drive. The trouble is it doesn't have a USB-B connection. (It does have USB-A connectors, intended for connecting to other terastations and UPS devices - my next step will be to try a USB A-A cable). I've tried connecting via ethernet to a second NIC on the PC, and putting the device on a separate subnet. I can then create a mapped drive for the Terastation, but can't share it - it's not possible to share a mapped drive. The thought of having the backup open like this is not good. Any help help would be appreciated. Any suggestions?

I've given up on deploying Solidworks. I've got the SolidWorks 2008-2009 Student Design Kit. The vendor's website provide instructions for creating an administrative install folder, and the mst. Can't use their tool to create the mst, due to missing properties. Tried creating my own mst with Orca - OK. Can't deploy their msi because it fails validation. Ran validation in Orca and it produced a very, very, long list of errors and warnings. Their website make it difficult to get support, unless you pay for it. Useless!

Just a warning. I had my CMIS eportal server also running VMWare Server 1.x OK. Just upgraded to VMWare Server 2.0 this last night and killed ePortal. Serco said they didn't know of any issues with VMWare and spent an hour over a remote desktop trying to fix it. In the end I uninstalled VMWare and eportal's back. Out of any interest, has anyone got eportal and VMWare Server 2 running on the same server OK? I don't mean running eportal on a VM.

Could this happen in England and Wales, or is it just the Scottish system? I feel sorry for her really. It's a shame that it had to come to this and she got all the bad publicity she's getting. Few people deserve public humiliation just for being bad at their job. It would have been much better for everyone if she could have just quietly left the profession, or been gently pushed out by her school or LA. I agree with AlexPilot, in that it might make more struggling teachers rethink their position and do the decent thing.