Tyiell

Hair of the dog? We have a crate of Carlesberg under my desk in the office, waiting of the right occasion. It has sat there since xmas because a) only 2 of us drink beer and it was given to us as a team so we'd feel bad about scarfing it and b) none of us particulalry like Carlsberg. We'll probably take it to the Staff Summer BBQ and neck it all!!

Is the fact that I am horrified at this statement indicative of my dependance on alcohol or (as the Daily Mail would probably have it) a reflection on society in general? (Or both?!) :D

Hmm. Get someone to carry you? I find these things tend to work themselves out once you're dunk... *edit: drunk (Think I've already shtarted on the whishkey... )

Meh, is your office on the ground floor? You could crawl back, but stairs can be a problem IME...

I live on site at my place, an arrangement with a whole host of disadvantages. But one of the few advantages is that I can pop home for lunch. So yeah, the whiskey sampling may start early here too!!!!

Not tried that one. Is it Peaty? I prefer the smoother ones as a rule, but not always! I'll give it a shot - have you tried Oban? That's pretty good too.

Just a few pints of London Pride for me last night (not my favourite, but the best available in the local). Tonight I'll be sampling Single Malt Whiskey from my recent hols to Scotland! I have Ben Nevis 10 yr old, Glenfiddich 12 year old and Tomatin 10 year old. Very nice stuff!!

Heres the Spam Report for a message so explicit, it I told you the subject I would probably be ejected from Edugeek forever: cached not score=-0.6335 required -1.80 ALL_TRUSTED Passed through trusted hosts only via SMTP -0.18 BAYES_40 Bayesian spam probability is 20 to 40% 0.00 STOX_REPLY_TYPE 1.35 TVD_RCVD_SINGLE Is there a way of editing the ALL_TRUSTED rule? Because it looks to me like not only is Bayes a little confused with it's probablility, but the ALL_TRUSTED seems to think it is trusted in some way? It's certainly not Whitelisted...

We do, I tried it last night and this morning. It said it had run successfully, but it hasn't seemed to change anything. I just sent myself the most abusive email I could possibly come up with and I could only get it up to a 2.4 spam rating (the first spam limit is 5 on our set up!). I reebooted the server afterwards, just in case the changes weren't filtering through for whatever reason. No joy as yet! Fortunately it is largely only allowing the most explicit ones through (very odd, like the definitions for sexual and abusive content are gone, but the rules for chain mail and adverts remain), and because they are so blatantly abusive, Exchange is picking most of them up...

Fairly large problem just turned up on our Spam Assassin filter that has totally confused me, any thoguhts on what might have caused it would be appreciated!!! We run a MailScanner install using ClamAV and SpamAssassin on and Ubuntu box and it has been working flawlessly for weeks, happily stopping 99% of our spam, including viagra-type adverts and any adult content. Today though, it was like a switch was flicked to send it totally backwards. It is still stopping advert-based spam about jobs and banking-type spam, but it is giving all adult content a clean spam rating!! Almost like all the bad words have been set to good ones!! No settings have been changed, but I was wondering if a dodgy update from the spamassassin people themselve went through? Any thoughts would be good - we are now relying on basic exchange filters to stop the kids getting adverts about what Madison Ivy does with various vegetables...!! Cheers!

We have an independant training centre that offers courses on Sims just down the road. They host the classes for the LEA, but let us in if we pay the bills. They are cheaper than Capita's proper courses and really very good (and reasonably priced).

Hmm. Do you also have a problem with Windows' God Mode, given that God him/her/itself is (probably) not actually using it?

Pre-built to our specs here. I don't doubt that it would be worth finding parts individually and building pcs in a small school, but in a school our size (1500 kids, nearly 200 staff) it's not really practical. In addition to the time and warrantly issues pointed out, it is also helpful to have all the computers as similar as possible throughout the school - ours are all HP or Viglen. That way once they are out of warranty, parts are interchangeable and the machines are standard...

Ditto. If more information is given I would help where I can (I bring little to the table when it comes to programming, but I would happily test it and promote it as far as possible), however keeping the identity of "the developers" hidden and not providing a website or trial version seems a little contrary to the concept of Open Source IMO.

What stupid thing have you done this week? ...I've come back to work!!! I was on holiday for a fortnight and now I'm back in the office. Other than that I spent 10 mins trying to work out why a teachers name had disappeared for the Marksheet owners list in Sims before it occured to me that only one year is open for reporting and she doesn't teach that year. Hence she doesn't own any markheets!!

Agreed, ours is cheaper every year - or was until the SLG came into play, and even then there was hardly any difference. If you talk to Capita directly they normally cut 10% or so off - particularly on big orders. We managed a 15% cut when we bought LM and SLG together...

Same here. And they will either email a response if it's a quick fix, or phone back very quickly with more help and information, and remote control if necessary. They even helped me fix a Firewall problem that was completely unrelated to Sims not long ago - just becasue I suspected it was to do with our SLG install (it wasn't!!). Capita support is excellent - better than the actual product, which I have mixed feelings about!!

Thank god, I thought it was just me who wears a large purple baby grow and yellow wig to work. Phew!!

Perfectly feasible - we run as a single site. This change was done before I joined the school so I can't tell you what the swap over was like, but the advantages of being single site are that you can talk direct to capita support, you get access to their SupportNet webpages and forums (an invaluable that was not available to us under the lea rule!). Plus you have control over when your updates are rolled out - avoiding the problems with re-releases and failed updates... You may find that certain suites have to be bought again though - we recently discovered that we had been using Profiles 7 without paying for it for years - they even gave us updates for it - because it had been installed under the LEA packages and never removed when we left. Only when we wanted support on it did they ever actually pick up on it!

We have made the decision to block all SSL traffic with squid. We have an exceptions list on the Squid ACL that lets us allow exam pages like Edexcel and the few others that need to ba accesses. When you think about it there are very few pages that people actually need that are SSL... I cant say for sure, having never tested it, but having set up the synetrix proxy as a cache that squid forwards all traffic to I am under the impression that it works exactly the same way as if the traffic went directly there.

I'm stuggling to open it at the moment, but my machine is misbehaving at the moment - I'll test it today, once I have kicked it back into line

I have a laptop with a high res (1920x1200) tft and a second 1280x1024 monitor. Works well, I couldn't do without the flexibility of a laptop as I move around site, but I always miss the extended desktop when I don't have it. Why? See attached!!

I only swapped to 7 yesterday - the first in the school to test it. We're looking to change over sometime this year. UltraVNC seems to work ok for me, although I haven't tried blanking the monitor yet- I'll do that next time and let you know how it goes!! The only issue I have is that every time I log in it has a message about there being no default password set. this always came up in xp the first time, but I would aknowledge the error and it would take me in to set one. After that, it would not bother me again. trouble is, when I click ok on the message in win7, it just disappears. Until the next time I log in!!! Other than that, ok so far!!

YES!!!! Can you email it to me? It sounds perfect, and well timed too - we have to make changes to the templates in a few weeks time...

Hardware specs are much less than windows - we have a filter server running on a decent quality desktop pc (Dual-Core 1.6Ghz with 1GB ram) - it flies. Although if the whole school is running through it a gigabit network card is probably best! Although not strictly recommended, we don't use the server edition - Ubuntu Desktop Edition is fairly intuitive to use and is stable enough for the job (debian more so, but I prefer Ubuntu for ease of use) - IMO although ideal, the server edition makes it more awkward to set up...