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We use Ghost to deploy new software to our workstations. It works pretty well, but it's a huge upheaval, and not appropriate for just one small package - we tend to do a manual install for that kind of thing. In the past we've experimented with software packaging - creating our own msi's but it's never been that successful. We've used winstall from veritas and a few trials of other products, none of which we've been 100% happy with. I guess this thread doesn't apply to the RM guys, but who here create's their own packages? or do you always Ghost, or do manual installs on all machines? I'd be happy to get some more MSI creator recommendations, if anyone has any.

Mark! Thanks very much, that worked perfectly. I owe you a virtual pint!

Mark - I can't remember the figures off the top of my head, but the box is something under a grand (probably £995) then it's so much a client (I think £8-10). I'll post the proper figures on Monday when I can get my hands on them.

It's a box that sits on the network with some bespoke operating system on it, seems to be linux based. The workstations get a client to run which is small - about 1 Mb and comes in an .msi which is handy. I'm not sure how the client works, and to be honest it's been driving me nuts trying to figure it out, but basically it captures any 'violation' on a computer screen. Now a violation can be swearing, bullying racism, pornography, paedophilia etc., etc. The violations are not just captured in Internet Explorer, but EVERYWHERE. If someone opens up notepad or anything and types "I'm gonna beat u up" for instance, that'll be captured. "beat u" is a violation. So, once there is a violation you can go to any workstation and put the IP address of the Securus box into a browser, log in and check out what's been happening. What you get is the computer name, the logged in username, the IP address, a screen dump of the violation and what word or phrase caused the violation. When I saw that they were sending screen dumps to the securus box I thought that the network would grind to a halt, but there seems to be no difference that I can see. If a client cannot connect to it's server for any reason it'll store the violations locally until it next makes contact. We haven't done this during our trial, and tbh I'm not sure that we would at all, but that means that if you install it on a teachers laptop, it'll continue recording violations while they're surfing the net at home during the weekend and upload the whole lot when they connect to the network again on Monday morning Also, the violations are not just captured because you've typed something, it's anything that appears on the screen, so if you open an email with swearing that will be captured.

Is anyone out there using Securus? We're in the middle of a trial at the moment. It seems pretty good at catching kids up to "naughty stuff", although we have found some bullying too. How do you cope with the amount of violations it captures? It's a pity it doesn't come with some kind of Active Directory integration so that you could easily seperate pupils and staff before you began monitoring them. One thing it's shown us is that the Instant Messaging problem we thought we'd solved is well and truely alive with Polish and Australian versions of online messenger.

Cheers Mark, I will try that.

RobC and Geoff, both of your answers should work. I'll definitely give it a try.

Is there some way to see all the posts posted by a member?

No, I haven't used the above extension, so I don't even know if it works. My point was that I wasn't going to deploy firefox until I could be sure that users could not install their own extensions. If you browse through the extensions you'll see that there are a lot of extensions that have nothing to do with web browsing. The above example was a proxy by-passer, but next week there could be a password cracking or key stroke logger, who knows.

I agree Mark.

There are a few. Try this one for starters: https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=448 Quick Description Browse any page with the Virtualbrowser, a free online proxy created to get past school blockers and internet filters.

That's what I thought by looking at it. It doesn't seem very intuitive though, so I've been unable to find the bit that will add NovaT to ClassTeach. If anyone knows were it is, I'd be more than happy. Cheers.

We have actually made the staff members of the local administrators group. You had to do that with the old SIMS, so they should have access to all those areas.

Wow, thanks for the quick replies Geoff and Mark. I'll give those a go tomorrow, hopefully I'll be able to add some of the extensions to the basic installation but prevent kids from installing others. Some of the extensions are scary from a network admin point of view.

I'm just wondering if any schools on here have given the pupils access to Firefox yet? I use it exclusively myself, but the fact that you can't control all the options through active directory means that I won't be giving it to the pupils yet. Is there some way to control the browser centrally?

What clicking? Do you choose to not deploy all patches automatically? I let MS install anything they please

Sure, Kevin. I'll fill in a report, we could all certainly do with a utility such as this.

Sorry to say that our restricted users can also get online that way.

We ran the client setup on the machine (I did notice that it extracted an msi - that'll be bloody handy if we get this working) The pages we tried to access was just google. We were logged in as an admin. I'll try with a restricted user.

Yep, I wouldn't have mentioned it unless I tried it. Explorer didn't close for us. We are using XP SP2 with a Windows 2003 server, if that's of any use. Any idea why that's not working then? It would be a fantastic product if that works, does it also stop other programs from going online. In the past kids have been able to surf the web using Windows Media Player even.

Ok, an update. We CAN get the NovaT icon on, if the teachers are a member of the Timetabler group. Unfortunately that's not wanted here - they get too many other permissions apparently. All the staff are a member of the ClassTeach group. What we want is to add NovaT to that. Is that possible? Cheers.

Ok, I've installed and run LanView3 for the first time. In terms of "blocking the internet" it's not very good I must say. IT doesn't actually block the internet instead it stops Internet Explorer and Firefox from running (other browsers too, I presume) Anyone who's spent any time in a school will know that the minute you block iexplore.exe from running, the kids will simply type http://www.google.com (or whatever) into an explorer window. You can browse the net quite happily from Explorer. Maybe I've done something wrong, apologies if I have, but please show me where.

So, people with generic networks should use TightVNC? Your documentation seems to imply that that should be used with RM, I wasn't sure what to use for our network. Also, can you change the server menu so it just shows "internet on" or "internet off" buttons for a teacher? If this could be done with a logon script that would be fine too. I've just downloaded it, but first impressions are pretty good.

Cheers for your updates, Altecsole. I'll check out all that tomorrow.

ChrisH, I'll try and mess about with the group memberships, but I thought I wouldn't have to if the could run Nova-T from the manually created shortcut. Cheers for the response.