Sephiroth

GLPI is the only Helpdesk/Asset Management system that I would recommend. Open-Source and free, feature rich and has easy acces to plenty of add-ons. It's what I use here, and I wouldn't be without it. Edit - @Tezza88 Beat me to it!

I would agree with @halbaradkenafin in that you will likely find it easier to get your script to write to a text file (be it CSV or TXT) then import it back into your main script. I've had success with getting variables into a remote sesion, but not writing a variable on a remote machine and bringing it out again. Look into the use of New-PSSession and Enter-PSSession cmdlets. I had a play on my domain and have as yet had no luck getting the kind of data you want purely through remote sessions and variables. Invoke command on it's own is frowned upon, but something like this should be alright: $Session = New-PSSession -ComputerName $RemoteComputer Invoke-Command -Session $Session -ScriptBlock { Enter Code Here } This page may help for testing of registry items, amongst other things. In the meantime, if you do figure it out, please post here, if only to satisfy my curiosity!

It depends on how you learn. Personally I learned by setting myself a project and looking up what I wanted to achieve at each step of the way on the internet. I started my first project looking to create student user accoutns from a CSV file. I eneded up with a script that automaatically provisions all student accounts from an automated SIMS report, creates their home directories and sets permissions, generates passwords for them, sets all of their group memberships (year of entry, year group, tutor group, et cetera), logs each created user into a csv with their username and password then e-Mails their tutor(s) and IT Services with the details of created accounts. All of this was done by looking up the commands to do each segment and learning what goes with what to produce what I wanted to do (and actually isn't that hard to follow... promise!). Powershell is a very simple language (compared to some others...) to get to grips with. You just need to know what you want to do in the first place. I've put similar posts in a few threads like this, but I'll reiterate if you (or anyone, for that matter) need any help, just ask.

Merry Christmas! Hope everyone is stuffing themselves stupid today. I certainly plan on it!

Submitted block request to e2bn.

I don't mean for you not to give it a go though!

This is a very good solution, but is a completely standalone solution IIRC. It is a domain in it's own right and creates all of the necessary infrastructure on Linux, such as LDAP and Samba for AD and file services... Fully recommended for a new Domain or a standalone system, but I don't believe it will help the OP.

I was looking at the LTSP on Ubuntu recently. Good fun to get involved with and very powerful whilst astoundingly simple to set up (took me about 30 minutes, though I know a lot about Linux)

If this is something that you're seriously considering, look into Puppet; a Debian based deployment mechanism. there are several methods of conecting a Linux machine to a windows Domain, and there are lots of 'How To' manuals online, with varying skill requirements and commandline knowhow. If you want to see what happens whrn you join to a domain, look up PBIS (Power Broker Identity Services) Beyond that, you'll need to look at the security considerations, such as remote access (ssh, telnet, vnc, etc) which is easy for others to achieve, removing access to the command line (if you think it appropriate; depends on your users and your trust... personally, I don't trust users!). My reccomendation for Windows applications, like SIMS, would be to roll up an Application RDP server. This has the benefit of being scalable in future and can be very useful for other things too. Only downside is licencing, but it depends how far you're willing to go. I have run various versions of Debian or Ubuntu for about 5 years to manage windows domains, and have been trying to get it out as a clientside OS for almost as long. It's not an easy route, but (IMO) a very rewarding one. I appreciate that you say you only want to do a couple and that mos of what I've just said is large scale, but it's worth looking at if you can get the Linux OS in the door, so to speak, as I think that it has a place in schools. If you need any specific help then feel free to ask and I'll do what I can to help, though I can't promise much!

+1 for Mathletics. We don't use it here (to my knowledge. It is possible that the maths department have been spontaneous!) but my son (age 7 but high competency) uses it at his school and loves it. It's at the point now that when he gets home, he would rather go on Mathletics than play games.

I used to run XenServer, and did have some problems with it. I seem to recall finding something on one of the log files, though I can't quite remember which one. they should be in "/var/log/messages" or "/var/log/xensource.log" I believe that these are the main log files for XenServer.

My Mother still has one of those. It's lasted through 4 phone changes that I've made (~9 years) and still has better battery life and signal that my current one!

Yeah, I had spotted that. I wasn't expecting anywhere near as many features. But then, i was thinking of Smoothwall, where all the features like that are in their paid versions.

I am now up and running on pfSense (after some fun with DNS forwarders... My DC was being a )! Thanks for the help, I'd have spent hours trying to diagnose that one.

That was a faster response than I was expecting! I'l have a look at PFSense then. I didn't realise that development had stopped. Thanks

Hi, I find myself a little stuck here. I'm trying to get my home network to sit behind a firewall/router. I have a VMWare host server with 4 NICs, currently set up with NIC 0 on LAN for all VMs and a LAN switch and NIC 3 on WAN of the Smoothwall VM. The WAN port connects to a BT Homehub 4 through which we get internet access. My PC should take the following route: PC NIC -> LAN Switch -> VMHost NIC 0 -> Smoothwall VM -> VMHost NIC 3 -> BT Homehub 4 -> Internet Unfortunately it's not working I have set the interfaces as 172.16.***.***/24 on green and DHCP on red (Homehub is a DHCP server). In theory this lets me get out to the web from green, through the Smoothwall box. However I can't get any further than the Homehub. I can ping Google from the smoothwall web interface, and can traceroute as far as the 7th step (131.55.163.*) but after that I just get asterisks. Also in this screen I get the error '31.55.163.* (reverse lookup failed)' for both ping and traceroute. I have tried changing the DNS servers to googles by setting a static address on the red interface, but same problem. Connecting direct to the homehub has always worked and still does. Anyone with some Smoothwall knowledge able to help on this?

I use a powershell startup script: $Profiles = gwmi -Class win32_UserProfile -Filter "RoamingConfigured='true'" Foreach ($Prof in $Profiles) { $Prof.psbase.Delete() }

I know you've already solved this but if anyone is interested, this is the method I would use to do this. It assumes that you have all of your Home Directories in one place (but can be modified with just a couple of extra lines to search within a directory tree) and that your directory names are the same as your Usernames: $Homes = Get-ChildItem "" Foreach ($HomeDir in $Homes) { $Name = $HomeDir.Name If (DSQuery User -SAMID $Name) { Write-Host "Account Exists for $Name" } Else { Remove-Item $HomeDir -Recurse Write-Host "Deleted directory: $Name" } }

My guess is that they require different versions of the same driver. If you can scavenge an nVidia card it should work. That's how I used to get 3 screens at home. If it's just to power anoyther screen and you're not going to be using it for graphically intensive stuff, any GPU will work that doesn't use the sam driver (in theory )

I can't say that I'd have done any differently. I would reccomend being less subtle though so they know why you're doing something. Attendants (from anywhere, not just restaraunts) like this don't seem to understand why people get irked by being ignored so that the attendant can carry on with their social chat.

Actually I have 4 mugs on my desk, just the others are hidden amongst the debris! I have one that I drink from and several that have never been used. There's one being used as a pen pot, one that just sits there and one that some very lovely people gave me at BETT this year, that has a lid

No Asus here I have 3 Dell 17", 1 Samsung 17" and an AOC 23". If I can post my rat hole, then so can you!

Sorry!

If you think about it, what do you actually do with your computer? almost everything that you do, with the exception of spreadsheets and media, is portrait. Even some spreadsheets are portrait. When I can get my hands on some more money, I plan on having a second one like the portrait and have 4 x 17" in a square, flanked by 2 x 23" widescreen portrait screens. Sadly though I can't take credit, thanks to @Irazmus for that one!

Quite messy at the moment due to everything happening at once and not having time to sort anything out! ...That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it...