iSteve

I need a bit of guidance. I understand VLANs, but I have never set one up in practice, and am a little unsure of a few things especially with our LEA managed network. Politics/PAT testing/antivirus aside for a moment, we have been asked to look in to the possibility of setting up wireless access for after hours governors meetings, and students. I don't want these on our network as you would expect, so, I presume we would want to set up a VLAN to put them on a private network. Even if we don't implement this, I'd still like to try it out as a learning exercise. Our main network switches are provided by and managed by our LEA, but we have a few HP1800-24G switches which we can control. How do I go about setting this up? If I put a port on one of our switches on to a private VLAN in one area of the school, how do I route this to our network for internet access? We also run Censornet for filtering, so would I need a second Censornet box on this new VLAN to provide the filtering? Any pointers welcome.

Well, after researching the t5135 we've decided not to waste time on the two we have. I've picked up an Axel client to evaluate and it looks like we're going to keep it.

Ok, I will have a go with a pen on one of our Prometheans just to be sure.

Hello, I'm trying to unravel something to do with IWBs in our new school. Our Finance Director has ordered 30+ mystery IWBs from our LEA. We already have 10 boards around the school (Promethean Activboard) which I believe you cannot write on with drywipe pen - they are digital use only. I've now been given the task to find out which boards we are getting as there is only space at the front of the room for a single board, ie, we can't have 1 interactive and 1 standard board. However, the person who has sourced them at the LEA is away for 2 weeks! I was wondering if anyone can advise me if there are any IWBs these days which you CAN write on with drywipe marker without trashing them?

If anyone knows where to find this free tool then please let me know! I've been on the Symmantec site previously and no joy. Our aim would be to make these boot (faster) in to a full-screen Citrix session...

I have a couple of hp t5135 clients which were purchased a year ago to use up some money, and to test out thin client boxes. From what I understand, there was some sort of management software for these (Altaris?) but the company has been taken over, and I can't track this down. As I say, I only have two so this isn't a big problem but would be nice to have. I've set one up to run a full screen ICA connection to our Citrix XenApp farm, but even though this is set to full screen, it still shows the HP client's tool bar along the bottom of the screen! Is there a way to make my Citrix session take precedence over this? My aim is to whack these in to a couple of staff offices to see how they react to them, but I need them to look as close to a "real computer" as possible - something that having Windows with a HP toolbar over the top ruins! Thanks.

Hello, I'm starting to do a bit of research in to upgrading the printing facilities in our school's art department. Here's some background: -1400 pupils, 11-16 plus 6th form. -Art department caters for both Art and Photography courses -5 art rooms Currently we have various printers in each room to cater for various scenarios: -2x HP 2605dn colour lasers with RAM upgrades -1x HP K8600dn for "good" colour printing -2x HP 6940 for quick colour printing -1x HP 1320 mono for text work Now, these are "doing the job" but I feel we should provide something better, particularly for GCSE and A level work. The 2605s are ok but slow with large files and colour is a bit iffy particularly with remanufactured toners. Some students require large format / A3 printing, hence the K8600. If you have have GCSE art / photography in your school, I'd be interested to hear what you provide, or what you would recommend printer hardware wise. As you can see, we favour HP. TIA.

Got it working now. I had not set up the two interfaces correctly. I now have one management, and one for VM traffic. All working! Thanks for your help.

Thanks - I have downloaded the manual to read as this is a new concept. What I am still unclear on, is why after converting this machine from P2V, it now gives the host two network adapters, both with 192 addresses? Will my virtualised server still be able to be on it's original IP address? I did try setting the virtual adapters (alternately) to the static IP I wish to use, but I do not get any network connectivity.

Hello, Over the summer we have stepped in to the world of virtualisation using Citrix XenServer. Now that this is in place we are looking to virtualise a few of our other low use servers. Due to OS support we are now also using ESXi 4.0. I have managed to P2V a Windows 2003 box on to our ESXi server but am now confused about how the networking of this guest OS works. Under XenServer, you assign the guest machine an IP address as you would a physical machine. In ESXi I am now shown two "VMWare Virtual Ethernet Adapter" devices with 192.168.x.x addresses. I presume that there is some NAT happening, somewhere, but I had intended to keep this virtualised machine in its original IP address. Can any ESXi users tell me how I can get this virtual machine to use it's original IP? Or quickly explain EXSi's guest networking system? Thanks!

There isn't a Mac version of Publisher. Do you mean Pages, by Apple? If so get them to save out as PDF or .doc format.

We didn't. In the end we ended up sticking with Network Home Folders (roaming profiles). The slowness which prompted me to try out this redirection was actually down to misconfigured DNS.

Hello, I'm just scratching the surface of testing out a VoIP system at school based on trixbox. I have this set up, and have added two extensions using softphones on a couple of Macs. I'm also getting hold of a couple of 2nd hand hardware phones just for the sake of it..... My question is, how do I connect the trixbox server in to the current phone system? This is not something we will be doing straight away as it is purely a test set-up at the moment. I read something about an FXO card, but I couldn't find much of an explanation of what this is, or what it does, or how it connects! What do I need to build or buy to be able to call from an IP phone, to a "real" phone on our Samsung DCS system, or from an IP phone to the outside world? Any advice is welcome!

You can't bind to both. We bind to AD, but then add in our OD server to the LDAP list but do not bind. This allows logins via AD and management via OD/MCX. This set up (with 10.4 and 10.5 clients) works fine. Management is off a 10.5 server. There was a big fat bug in the 10.5.4 AD plug in which caused bindings to be lost whenever the machine felt like it, but using version 1.6.3 which went in to 10.5 works much more reliably.

Well, I've just fully updated Retrospect (to 7.6), on top of updating firmware on the drive and magazine. Still no luck. Looking at the Retrospect forums there are users on there with the same issue

We have one of the above units which I am trying to get working. We run EMC Retrospect 7.5 under Server 2003 R2. The tape unit is connected via SCSI. Since I've inherited this tape loader, it has never done a successful multi-tape backup. I had managed to load tapes in to it, and assign them to a backup set, but once the first tape is full, Retrospect times out waiting for the second tape. The machine never loads the 2nd tape in to the drive (it stays in the magazine). Recently, Retrospect will see the tape drive, but does not show the magazine so I cannot assign tapes to a backup set apart from the one in the current drive. The web interface to the drive, and the LCD panel do not show any errors. Has anyone one had success with one of these units with Retrospect? I really need to get good off-site backups going on. *edit* We've also tried the machine under Retrospect 6.5 on a second backup server (Server 2003). This again sees the drive but does not pay attention to the fact there is a magazine of tapes in the unit.

If the kids are working in DV video, that consumes 13GB per hour. Personally, I would steer clear of any media work or video editing taking place over the network and force people to work locally. I would expect wireless to be a big big problem for you when doing media work.

I know there is a "connect as..." button in 10.5+, but there doesn't seem to be a way to side step the cleverness of Kerberos under 10.4, apart from un-joining these machines from the Windows domain, having 100% local accounts with local auth. Only pain with this is changing the managed prefs from group level to machine level

Sophos AV here

To do (some of) our Internet filtering, we use Censornet's free software on a dedicated box. I'm not aware that there's a proxy/filter built in to OS X Server.

Hello, I have some "special" Macs in a media room which log on to our network (Active Directory). Students on these machines will need to connect to one of our AFP servers using Finder --> Go --> Connect to Server, however, I need them to connect as a different user. The Finder does not ask the user for authentication, instead using pass-through authentication to list the shares available to the user logged in to the console. I need to be able to force the Finder to always ask for authentication when mounting a share. It seems possible in 10.5 (Mac OS X 10.5: Connecting to an AFP server as a different user) but I need to do this under 10.4.11. All hints gratefully received!

I've just been through all our 14 or so data cabinets. Anything that links to a switch in a classroom, or an uplink in the cabinet is RED. I then got a bit of electrical tape and a Sharpie and write whatever it is I need to on the tape, and wrap it round the cable like a flag. Also working in technical theatre, marking stuff up with electrical tape and a pen is second nature! It's very cheap, doesn't go sticky or flake like Sellotape, nor does it require any special printers!

This is what we do, except when our switch was changed over this week it was re-plugged in to the mains! Next time we have a spot of downtime it'll be moved on to a UPS.

Thanks for your responses. I'd not heard of NVP values before, but I will make sure I get decent cables in a few weeks time, and box them in....through a massive hole

If it's flagging up adware...that's technically not a virus is it - so maybe it won't automatically delete it.