Tricky_Dicky

3s-gtech - I was looking at something a bit beefier, mainly because space isn't too much of a premium and I'd like to have plenty of storage in it. j17sparky - Have you done an install of Mhythbuntu? It looks awesome and I've been looking at it for a while, the only thing that worries me is how difficult it is to set up. From what I can tell it can do some amazing things but if it takes 12 months to get working the WAF might not be too impressed. Which version of the Eeebox or Revo would you go for for the clients? Cheers for the input though guys, some great ideas.

I was thinking in the region of about £500. Not to bothered about games on it, the main thing is going to be watching films and recording TV. It should be able to cope with at least two other media centres streaming content from it at some point. The recorded TV will be DVB-T, haven't got a satellite dish and don't really fancy one unless you think it's worth it? Cheers Rich

I'm looking to build a Media Centre PC and put Windows 7 on it and was just wondering if people had any recommendations of the best hardware combination at the moment? Also, does anyone here run Windows Home server and is it worth it? Just thinking in the future I would like to store all music/photos/videos on something a bit more central. Cheers Rich

Lol, I'd love to. IE8 has caused no end of problems with ePortal. Have installed Firefox on to most machine now.

Cheers for the help so far. I'm using Sophos. How did you fix the permissions problem? Rich

Hi, I have one image that I use for all the laptops in school and it seems to work fine, but one of the teachers laptops is constantly hanging. It will work fine for a short period of time (10 minutes say) but then explorer will stop responding and the only way to get round it is to reboot, even restarting explorer doesn't help. It seems to get worse if I'm doing things involving network drives, such as mapping them or moving data. Any ideas? This is driving me insane! Rich

I've also got some spare AP's if you are in a bit of a mess, but in my opinion it's not more access points you necessarily want. Have a go at turning of all the APs apart from 1 which is in the classroom of the netbooks you are trying to log on. This will stop a lot of the interference that you can get from wireless networks. We did it here before the Ruckus kitted arrived and it helped a bit. Good luck p.s. You could always ask for a loan kit of the Ruckus to tide you over until you can get a PO in Once they teachers are used to it and the head see's how good it is then you won't have a problem getting the money

I'm not sure what's happening there then. But it depends what you are comparing it the wired and wireless speeds too. If you have a Gb connection plugged into a laptop and then change over to a G connection then it will be slower and no wireless solution in the world is going to be any better. Something to think about though is what exactly are the laptops going to be used for? When I first started I got given lists upon lists of programs which "must" be installed on everything because they are used "all" the time. Having installed almost none of them, no one has mentioned them as being missing! These days almost all teaching that I witness using laptops is based on the internet using web 2.0 applications or MS Office. Maybe it's different in your school but that is my opinion. I stand corrected on the frequency, it can be either, but not both. I have no idea why it wouldn't select the wider band, try logging a call directly with Ruckus and see what they say. A managed solution will do that to a point but only when it hits a certain level. Lets say the access point and client are still communicating at 10Mb/s, if the client is set to not change unless it has to then it wouldn't bother. Best of luck with which ever solution you decide to go with and keep me informed of how you get on! Rich

Q1)Haven't used it to be honest, never saw the point in putting more strain on bandwidth. I took the opinion that if the clients find it working quickly then it is quick enough. Q2)I think "a" uses the 5GHz spectrum, "n" is still in 2.4GHz. Q3)It will sort it out for you, but it won't do it immediately. It appears to scan every 10 minutes or so and will adjust not only the channel it transmits on but also the amount of power it is transmitting, reducing the power or changing the channel as it sees fit. This works very well indeed. Q4)Moving clients on to a better AP is a local configuration on the client. It depends on how high the roaming is set to. The Intel chip sets have the values available to change in the advanced properties. Q5)All I can think of for this is that you have set up 2 SSIDs or the guest access it turned on but not configured. If you are using the newest software (8.1) then it could also be the hotspot software. I installed the system at our large Primary school over the summer and after a disastrous first lesson with the kids updated the software and it is now working so well it's frightening. It basically manages it's self and no one even notices it's there it just works which is exactly what I wanted. Good luck Rich

Yes, or at least I think so.

Hi all, I'm trying to upgrade the entire school to Promethean Active Inspire software and running in to a few problems which I'm hoping someone can help with. I've got the exe file and run the network install on the server, this has created the MSI's for deployment perfectly. I then ran the ASTransGen which creates the MST and admin.ini file. It was within here that I specified things such as the location for installing the software, the resources and the shared resources. However when I've deployed the MSI's via a test GPO it has ignored those settings. I've raised a call with Promethean asking for some help and got the following reply: "Good afternoon, Unfortunately we do not support network installs, however attached you will find a help .pdf file that you can use as a guideline. I hope this helps. Kind regards, Customer Support" The aformentioned PDF is the network install instructions which I have followed. Has anyone managed to do this properly and if so how? Thanks Rich

I did a sandwich placement in IT and found it invaluable. You have to be prepared to train the student though and make sure you get the advert in to the local uni early to get a good one. In terms of what they can do it depends very much on how much you let them. Most of the time its sorting printers and mundane stuff so you can focus on the more complicated problems, but I developed some projects of my own including a complete (long over due) overhaul of the server room. For the money they can be a fantastic resource IMO. Rich

Hi, Does anyone know if it's possible to create a CD/USB drive with a bootable ghost image with all of the different network card drivers? So instead of having a different CD for each NIC I just have one universal one and it will load the correct one. At the moment I've probably got 6 different discs and its just a pain to do. Regards Rich

I'm looking for prices on the following projector lamps, it won't be one big order of all of them, but an as and when needed thing. Sanyo PLC-XU41 Sanyo PLC-XE40 Sanyo PLC-SE20 Sanyo PLC-SE20A Sanyo PLC-SE15 Sanyo PLC-XE31 Cheers Rich

Hi, Regards the wireless then I would go for a Ruckus solution. Have a hunt around the forums and loads of people talk about it. It very easy to setup and basically just works out of the box, right down to swapping channels and reducing power output when it detects interferance. It is also a lot cheaper than almost all other managed systems. Have a word with CP Ltd for a good price. The WSUS problem, you might as well uninstall it and reconfigure the GPOs so that they get their own updates, would save a lot of bother in the short term and when you get a bit more settled have a look at implementing a better solution. Good luck Rich

Hi, I have a strange problem where one teacher goes to open files in a certain folder and the majority are coming up as read only. The teacher has normal permissions to the folder and no one else is reading the files at the same time. I've tried un ticking the read only box on the server for the folder it is happening in but that doesn't seem to have made any difference. Any ideas as it is annoying me and I'm getting lots of hassle about it? Cheers Rich

Would it be worth looking at using Google or Edu@Live services instead? Both a currently free for educational use, you don't need to support any hardware and their uptime is very good. I'm playing with the Google system at the moment and it is so easy to manage, provides both outlook integration and webmail immediately and most people are used to the Google way of things

Hi, Don't give up on Mail for Exchange, it's pretty useful. When setting it up originally it seemed to make a big difference on the server address used. For Example: If you used https and put that at the front of the server address AND ticked the box saying use secure then it would send "Https://https://mail.example.com/" as the server address. I found this by using wireshark which might help. Make sure the times are the same on both server and phone. Including things like time zones and day light savings, this has caused problems in the past. Good luck Rich

Hi, As the message suggests it basically means that the voltage hitting the UPS is greater than it has been told to expect. This can be an issue but depends on how the UPS is configured, for example, if it has been told to report an over voltage at 241V then I wouldn't worry too much however if it is 260V then it might be worth giving an electrician a call and getting him to check things out. As it's an APC UPS have you check the logs? They have a nice web GUI that gives loads of information. Rich

I was planning on putting 2 Drives in the old server mirrored so if one fails it shouldn't be a problem. FreeNAS looks great, but what software would you put on the new (Windows 2003) server to backup to it? Rich

Would an offsite backup still be required if the backup box was in another part of the building?

Hi all, I'm just having a new server installed and was told when purchasing it that it wouldn't be a problem to move the SCSI tape drive from the old server to the new one. However at 2.30 yesterday I received a call saying it wouldn't fit and I would need to sort some other backup solution (cue sales pitch for new NAS drive). I was planning on using the old server with some large HDD's and just using that as a NAS box. It has a licence for windows server 2003, but would you recommend using that or would Linux be better? Depending on the answer to the above, what software would you use to actually do the backup? Cheers Rich

Would love to come to this, but it's my sisters wedding on that day and I don't think she would be to impressed if I missed it.

Looks good. Jamin100, what problems are you having with ePortal? I thought it was something that I had done. Some times it wont log on, other times it will just hang that sort of thing.

Proxy settings it is then Cheers guys. Stupid mistake on my part! On a lighter note, the Ruckus is now deployed and working well. Only down side is it's tricky to do a mass test on it until September when the little darlings come back (teachers that is) Rich