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That's right Chris, but 100% is a bit much. Can you tell me who your supplier is Mark and we'll try and get the same deal. Cheers.

Cheers for the pix, Mark. I think we can all agree that it's pretty darn sexy Now, Mark, are you sure about the £480 price tag? We were quoted a lot more (I think, I'll double check later)

With SMB, can it interact with AD, so that you can apply user permissions on a folder?

What's wrong with getting a PC with onboard RAID. Don't use the RAID, just use it for extra HD connections, therefore you can connect 6 or 8 drives to it and get over 2TB of storage for under 2 grand. All you do is share drives, right? I'm clearly missing something, as prices are always much more than that.

Stewart, how do you find the reporting aspect of it? It would be nice to view just the violations for: "IT Room03" - Period3, for instance. There is no way (that I can see) that you can group PCs into different rooms. You can, of course, export the violations to a CSV and maybe manipulate the data once you're in excel, but it would be nice if the box itself showed a lot more varied reports.

Chris, even though you may have been looking for the wrong thing, what you posted above IS what I would expect. You would imagine that the machine would look locally first before querying the server, but doesn't appear to how it works.

Only when he sleeps on a fork

Sorry, We have Windows 2003 servers with AD and XP clients. We have an ISA2004 box as a proxy/firewall and there's probably somewhere to do it in there if I could find it.

Interesting - you make the parents sign an AUP just to log onto the computers, not the internet? We stick all the pupils into a "No Internet" OU at the start of the school year and then as the internet AUPs come in we move them to their proper class OU. So, without a signed AUP they can log on and use the school software, they just can't get online.

Hi there. At home I bypass adverts and popups online by making my hosts file divert those sites to 0.0.0.0. It's a common trick which most of you probably use as well, but if you haven't heard of it before the details can be found here. I've tried to implement this in the school too, but it doesn't work. It looks like the hosts file is ignored when you join a domain. I presume it's because the DNS server takes a higher priority. Is there some way to incorporate the entries in my hosts file into DNS or somewhere else that will take account of them? There must be a way, but I can't find it.

You have to run "forestprep" and "domainprep" to prepare your existing AD setup. Those are both on the I386 folder of your Windows 2003 Server CD if my memory serves me right.

How many domain controllers and member servers do you have?

Geoff, can you PM me those step by step instructions too. That'll be frightening if possible here.

I see a few people mentioned NAV taking up a lot of resources, and up to version 5 that was true. The last few versions of SAV sit happily and quietly on a machine doing their job. No more is there a default of a complete system scan on each bootup as there was with version 5

We use Symantec Antivirus Corporate. The local borough have a "borough-wide" license with them. To be honest, I wouldn't use anything else now. Deploying it is a piece of cake, it's detected anything that's come in and automatically updates the clients quietly.

Cool, Dos_Box, no rush. Are requests like this a pain, or do you like to know what extra things users would like to have?

So, how about it? Any chance of an RSS feed for "latest news from the forums"? I don't want to put more un-neccessary pressure on a new site, just would be handy if you guys have the skills. Cheers.

Any response from the site owners?

Ok, the Securus box is £960 and the clients range from £9 to £13 depending on how many you have. You can take money from the "Social Inclusion" and "Behavior Management" budgets to help pay for it (It sure ain't coming out of mine ) They're giving out trials left, right and centre, so it's worth contacting them. It's interesting to see what's going on in your network behind your back if nothing else. They have a few resellers around the country I think, for us in Essex and East London it's a company called Computer Talk. (020 8595 7744 if anyone's interested, but all you guys seem to be in Lancs. or Wales)

I don't understand this. I've used Squid and Dansguardian in the past but don't know how you could use it to allow access to folders. Can you point me at some tutorials for this please. Cheers.

We always get ours from the local borough who give us corporate media with corporate keys, which don't need activation. They have some deal with MS, is that not the same in all boroughs?

Yes, the big problem is that any solution has to be simple to use from home. If there's any setting up of connections etc., it's only going to end in tears. Parents who have crappy computers will blame the fact that "Alien Killer 8" no longer works on our instructions on how to connect to the school network. "It all worked fine until then" etc., etc.

Mark, Office is the easiest thing to install. I don't install it using RIS, but instead have an admin install of office on a hidden share in the server. Office is deployed to all PCs throughout the domain using a software deployment group policy. So, RIS joins the PC to the domain and on next reboot office gets installed (along with Symantec antivirus and a few other odds and sods)

Who has set up a system to allow pupils to access their work from home? I've recently followed a set of instructions on the uk.education.schools-it newsgroup about setting up a website with IIS to share webfolders. That does work, but I'm not sure about the security implications so I haven't set it up for the pupils yet. Also, is there a way to save to those webfolders from home? It appears that you can just view them and then right-click and choose "save as" to work on them locally. What are you guys doing? I know some boroughs are hosting VLEs, but ours doesn't

We use RIS to setup basic stations. Then we've altered the default OU for new computers to one that deploys all our MSIs. That's fine as far as those programs go, but what about all the old crap you're given to install? RIS is of no use to those programs. It's either Ghost an image with those already installed or create your own MSI as far as I'm concerned. I know the appdeploy.com website, but there is an awful lot of things to learn for different installations. I would like a program that will take a snapshot of a pc, then you install your program, then you tell the program to take a second snapshot of your machine, and whatever the difference is, that'll be your MSI. Now, there certainly are programs that do this, but I've never been happy with any of them.