LWard

Hi there, Thanks for the assist but those don't seem related to Response, although I did use them to get rid of a couple of other messages! This is the thing that keeps popping up: I can't see anything obvious in the registry that'll get rid of it, unless it's an added setting.

Good Afternoon all, I'm prepping a new image for the PCs in Professional Development and something that has bugged me with the SMART Response software rollout has been this silly "Getting Started" bubble that appears at the bottom right of the screen every time someone logs on. Is there an administrative way of stopping this from coming up completely? I've gone in to the Response preferences in Notebook, and the Response clicker setup and can't find an option to turn it off. Cheers in advance.

Morning all, We've got a staff member who has managed to install Firefox on one of our locked down workstations. I wiped it off once, but just 10-15 minutes later, it was back. We use Ranger so it should be blocking it's installation, but after a look through his USB stick via RRC, I noticed two files which look like LanSchool disable scripts (Seems to kill "teacher.exe"?). My colleague said they could be normal files used by LanSchool, but I'm a bit of a security freak. We don't use LanSchool, but this staffer may have come from a school that was using it, and I'm concerned he may have Ranger disable scripts somewhere if he feels restricted by Ranger (we have workstations pretty well locked down). This is a bit of a security issue for obvious reasons, that, and the staffer isn't following policy by filling out a change request and getting it cleared by my boss for it's installation. The PC is on a VLAN that has no direct access to the internet but has ISA's Firewall Client installed, so would not having the proxy option set, but be querying ISA directly using the firewall client get around the filtering WebMarshal does? Finally, is there a blacklist for specific executables in Group Policy anywhere? There are all manner of programs installed on all of our workstations so want to avoid a whitelist-only approach if it's possible. Thanks in advance.

Has the GameKillerApp.exe process got write permission in the toCheck directory? Just on the subject of GameKiller3, how's it coming along?

Thanks much for implementing the fix for my last reported problem! Can do sweeping destruction now without getting .NET errors! Are there any best practices for creating signatures at all? For a while I've put everything in to a single master list, then smaller lists as I find new flash games and games embedded in excel spreadsheets and PDFs and each time, as expected but not quite as much, scanning speed gets significantly slower each time. Is it preferred to add a small (5 or 10) files to a signature before creating a second list or to create one single file with everything in it? Reason I ask is that sometimes I'm asked to build a list of students with games in their areas literally 8 hours (or worse, 15 minutes notice, but thats an impossibility) before SMT (so he can name and shame students, especially reoffenders) and it normally requires over 24 hours to complete! Secondly, Signature Creator creates a signature file based on what you enter in the "Signature Title" box. As a result there are some symbols that should never be used in there, like ":" or "\". Might be worth sticking some field validation in there to avoid someone reporting it in the future. And lastly, whats the possibility of an "Add Folder..." button which allows someone to add a folder full of games or infringing files in one go? If someone is new to Edusweep and they have a large list of files they've taken from students areas they want to have removed/logged on each run, then having to add each file individually might be a put off! Wasn't for me because it was literally a case of do that or use the Windows search tool to traverse the entire of student home directories and look for files with the same file sizes and individually note down their usernames, how many infringing files they had, where they were located and to check again the next day to see if they got rid of them, adding each file individually was the easy option! Thanks for building such a fantastic tool, saves me hours of manual report building!

Good greif, they're getting clever now. They are pretty much embedding the game inside another flash file, thus, creating a different hash (There's an additional wrapper around the game itself so the hash changes. The only way to get round this would be to look for a specific chunk of ASCII in the file(easiest, unless compression mangles it), or somehow conjure up heuristic scanning that nails it whatever they do, but I hardly think thats easy in VB.NET. Good learning experience this is I must admit, I'm learning things that I never went in to in college (in ye olde VB 6 days).

We're on a vanilla network, kind of. We use RfN so I guess we're almost vanilla. It does indeed work. The GameKillerApp.exe file (along with the other library files) goes on to a share (or C drive) which is completely hidden and inaccessible to the end user but can be reached by the local machine itself (Probably a share mapped during login, but made inaccessible via GPO or RfN). It relies on mcp.ini (local machine, but if you've got VB 2008 Express you can change this to get it's config directly from another drive), a directory to dump logs in, a directory in there called "tocheck", and of course the hashlist.txt file which is made courtesy of mcphasher.exe. We're still yet to deploy (Testing in Library at present) as I'm looking at how network communication is handled in VB2008 and hopefully look at a server-side portion or something to get it's configuration and hashlists from rather than a set of files, which works, but a console server would be great for debugging during pilot, and further additions as I wouldn't mind seeing if it's possible to drill down further in to the workstations and look at what file handles specific applications have open, like the standalone flash player. We're not killing the flash player at the moment as the kids use flash buttons (DiDA) rather than making their own. The ICT teachers are wonderful but I do wish that they'd look at preventing the kids from using flash buttons after they've completed their current project and give them a selection of Photoshop PSDs and have them make up their own buttons (Infuriating as if we ever do a global search on our filestore for .swf files, there's millions of flash buttons between all the games, and nor can we just globally ban .swf files on the filestore otherwise my phone would light up brighter than Blackpool illuminations). I don't think Edexcel require they use Flash buttons in their DiDA projects so I don't see it being an issue.

I can confirm this, happens every time. Files with exactly the same names, have to do one at a time when I reach files of the same name. Otherwise, it's fine.

Yeah, nailed it thanks. I didn't have any luck in getting MCPHasher to work initially so I used another tool to do it for me, which doesn't remove duplicates, and also capitalises all the letters in the strings, which might have been what was causing the unexpected behavior! MCPHasher is alright so long as, if you don't have a hashlist initially (You're trying it out for the first time) create an empty text file and get it to open it. This is a very snazzy piece of software I must say. I did VB6 at college and it's quite interesting to see it's almost the same 9 years on in VB 2008. The code is really clear to read too, nice job! I'm a considerable stats whore so will probably look at adapting it with a web-based frontend for configuring it and compiling output logs, but no idea when I plan to look at doing that. Kids are going to love it, might be tempted to try this at home to see what my brother thinks of it!

Apache is acting like it's forgotten it's MIME types and isn't telling the browser how to render the page. I suppose IE would display something as it tries to 'assume' the MIME type if not included? There should be some Addtype lines in your httpd.conf file that associate both HTML and PHP files to their reletive MIME types. Have you had this working without ntlmauth?

Don't mean to be a pain, but does this work with a specific version of Internet Explorer? Can't remember what I did to get it working on Server 2003 but can't seem to get it to find a correct hash for a game in IE on one of our student workstations (Windows XP, IE 6 (A minor version number lower than that of Server 2003)). Almost every time it'll copy the game out even if it's in the hashlist if MAKECOPY is on. Registry file applied too, so it's not missing any of it's prerequisites as far as I'm aware. This said, it detects games properly if loaded in Flashplayer and closes flash player fine. Anything really obvious I'm missing because I think I've nailed everything.

Greetings, First of all, thanks for creating a really useful tool for combatting the scurge of student's game collections. Secondly, I'm having trouble with a couple of signatures I've made which are file specific but EduSweep doesn't detect them as such ("This signature detects specific files" remains unchecked). As a result, when using the file-specific signatures by themselves, nothing is detected. Am I missing some tickbox somewhere or are my students actually telling the truth when I chase them up about games in their user areas? Edit: Myself and my colleague here have worked out that changing the filename and/or title of the signature in the file itself causes that particular signature to pretty much not work. Both title and filename need to match exactly it seems. All is well and it's picking up hundreds of flash games in users areas. Now to write up reports on it's findings. Thanks again.