SpuffMonkey

How do you cope with logins for supply teachers? I've tried having fixed logins/passwords per dept - but the kids were onto that pronto. I've tried making them come and get a password from me - but that's too hard. Invariably they end up logged in as one of the regular staff under a "borrowed" password. Any ideas for making this work a bit better? Cheers

Have you thought of going over to the VMWare Site - d/l a (free) copy of VMWare Player, then have a browse through their free appliances list (VMWare Appliances) - there is a Squid/Dansguard one - d/l it, load it up in Player and Bob's yer uncle - jobs a goodun - well nearly.... So Geoff - how do you point Squid via the RBC proxy? Haven'y quite worked that out yet. Oh - and there are some fab Network Monitoring appliances - even an Online Learning Suite and a setup for secure diskless Internet Cafe PCs amongst hundreds - its a great resource.

Hmmm - are you sure about that?? :?

And me!

40 - pah! Nobbut a lad. You wait til you apply for your next job - then you'll know what over the hill means!

In a previous life - I used to run a system fron these guys http://www.id-data.co.uk/ which are based in Corby - so you might be able to cut a deal, Tony 0 they were helpful and did about everything in this sphere. Cheers

True - it isn't VPN - but direct control of your PC in the office is pretty good - then you can RDP to any servers, do your email etc anyway. Well - it works for me.

Edugeek - home of the fecund and fertile. Congrats!

Seconded - great bit of free kit

I'm using EventComb - but desperately seeking something better - please let us know if you find something

We use a Universal Boot Floppy thing I found on the net - it boots and creates a ram disk and does it all from there - I can send details if you want.

Ah - right - I thought you did - its handy because it easily displays who they are logged in as and also the PC ID if they need remote assistance - so I would've liked to have used it in that way.

Sorry - I meant they are resetting the wallpaper on the local PC after the login script sets the Bginfo wallpaper - so bginfo runs successfully and the wallpaper is set - then the kids use IE or whatever to set their own wallpaper for the duration of their login session. I used to set the wallpaper in GPO via Active Desktop - so that it couldn't be changed - but couldn't see how you can do it using bginfo as if you set the Active Desktop wallpaper - it can't be overridden by bginfo?? Or am I completely mistaken?

I know this was a long time ago Geoff - I did this in the summer - really useful to see the PC ID and IP addy etc - but the kids are resetting the backdrop with "inappropriate" pictures - is it possible to use BGInfo, but have its backdrop set so it can't be altered?? Cheers

Righty ho - got it all working now - can anyone recommend a noce tool for analysing the logs - I particularly want to see file creations and deletions. I've got EventComb - which is...OK...but would like something better and free if available - any ideas? Thanks

You only need a copy in each My Docs area if you're interested in them saving away the program in the state they left it (ie the sizes of windows etc), otherwise you can (usually) run from one central folder.

I need to audit file creation & deletion on a 2003 server - the audit needs to really run over several weeks (if not longer) Can someone point me to a good idiot's guide on how to do this effectively - or to any (cheap) tools that could assist? Thanks

I think you're a brave man - I wouldn't allow direct access to it from outside as I was worried about DPA issues - I make them come in via Citrix - so at least I know whats going on.

You only need WINS for 9x/NT4 clients. If you don't have any of those left you can safely remove WINS from your servers. 2k/2k3/XP use DNS exlusively. I thought you still needed WINS to populate a browse list - certainly BackUp Exec didn't like not having WINS running???

We've got them in every classroom - we'd need extra staff for a cleaning regime like that!

This doesnt give an easy way to see all the user at any given moment does it? Not sure which one you're asking about - but Limitlogon comes with a litle reporting tool - not elegant, but it does work. GPInventory has to do a sweep of PCs to have a look - takes about 60 seconds on our network (of about 400). I've no doubt there are better tools - but these are free.

Yeah - I have a Local PC Admin security group on the AD, and on the PCs we give it administrative rights - so you can pop a user into the group temporarily, then take them out again - only snag is it can take a couple of reboots to apply.

I've had this on Mitsubishi's - its expensive and annoying - haven't found a real solution though.

The quickest and cheapest is to download GPInventory from MS - it does users and will also show details of all your kit (thanks to whoever it was on Edugeek who told me about it). Also you can try LimitLogon (also MS) - which can produce reports of logged on users and restrict their number of logins.