Rammie

Oh dear, I think I was looking for reassurance and everyone would be telling me it was just my paranoia. Lets see what we collect...

Well it's a safe conclusion, but I was at a loss to explain why nearly new projectors in a relatively clean environment and low hours would be overheating. I get lamps failing this way occasionally with other brands, but only when near the end-of-life AND we've overlooked the filters for a while. Rarely, we've had lamps pop for no apparent reason. That's with an inventory of over 100 projectors, quite a few over 10 years old.

The lamps are OEM - they've never been replaced until now. The filters were clean-ish when I replaced the lamps (okay, not spotless, but far from choked). I bought three units for a new building, installed Sept 2014 and now two out of three have failed.

Anyone having problems with UF70 lamps failing early? I've had two lamps fail within a few weeks, both with overheated capsules (one just inflated, the other shattered) on projectors with less than 1000 hours on them. Could be just coincidence, but just wondered if anyone else had encountered short life problems?

I see more than four choices. 1. DMZ - no chance! Zero security. 2. UPNP - compromises security for entire home network. 3. Pretty much identical to 1. 4. Not really practical and Sony completely ignore users anyway. 5. Use WireShark to analyse traffic. 6. Open ports one by one and find out what works and what doesn't. 7. Persevere with Internet search in the hope of finding someone who's already done 5.

OB1: yes, I've seen that information and copies of it repeated ad infinitum. It's too vague - this is precisely the kind of indistict garbage I'm trying to improve on. Saying that PSN "USES" a port is not enough. I find it hard to believe it uses ports 80 and 443 for INCOMING traffic and I'm very sceptical about letting it do that anyway, not to mention conflicting with my other systems. Port 5223 - I dunno, could be, but what's it used for? I appeciate your comments about Destiny being launched so recently - an excellent point. Bungie have already posted a networking patch to fix a lot of "centipede" errors, so evidently they have some networking stuff to learn too. Interestingly, we encountered a show-stopping error because the second DNS address wasn't populated through DHCP. Wierd - clearly someone hasn't read the RFCs properly. As for UPNP, that's a significant security risk. You can't target it at one device, all your devices will have access to it. PC Trojans exist that have UPNP functionality and, if you get infected, will automatically open incoming ports to blitz your network. In other words, a firewall with a prominent switch to turn it off - what a stupid idea. Do I want to do this? No thank you!

Kinda off-topic, I know, and I apologize in advance, but does anyone know the basic Playstation Network inbound port mapping for your common-or-garden home router? I'm getting desperate and my son is driving me bananas because he keeps getting errors with online games on his PS3. Regrettably, most gamers know zilch about networking and either recommend DMZ mapping or blanket port mapping of vast areas of the port range. Both result in a home network crippled for any other shared devices and/or dangerously insecure. Obviously, outbound ports are never a problem because most routers are transparent to outbound connectivity. Inbound ports are rather more critical and need to be identified accurately. I'm getting heartily fed up of sifting through write-ups that drone on about how to program the router (I'm Cisco trained...) or which completely fail to distinguish between outbound and inbound paths (blanket port mapping). Has anyone got this sorted in terms that I would understand? The game of the week, by the way, is Destiny and I'm fairly sure I've got Destiny's port mapping correct, because Bungie themselves have explained it properly (thank goodness...)

Anyone know anything about licensing BskyB's "The Cloud" on school premises? I have some pressure to provide public access to Wifi (we have Mr & Mrs G Public in certain areas after 5:00pm), but I really can't be bothered with managing the authentication issues that go with this. While I know that The Cloud supply hardware for pubs and clubs, I wondered if they could provide service on our own WiFi network (i.e. just provide authentication and let us provide the air-service). Free would be good:rolleyes: Any thoughts?

This is an old thread, I know, but I have a Honeywell HREP16 DVR CCTV system - it uses what sounds like the same ActiveX control and it does the same thing - using IE8, the Honeywell Web Viewer constantly hangs up and fails to show anything on the screen. As with Gongalong's CCTV system, the ActiveX control reports as "WebViewer Control" dated 22/08/2011 19:42 and version 1.2.3.8, but without any other publisher information (Control name is not available) - a sure mark of an East-Asian manufacturer who chooses not to put his name on his handiwork. One wonders if the Ganz Digimaster DR16H and the Honeywell HREP16 are one and the same product (in different clothing) - and using the same flaky firmware.

Ha ha ha! Talk about cross-purposes, Creese. No, I wasn't being cryptic, I meant "break" as in not working, as you now realise. Yes, I understand "not supported" to mean I wouldn't waste my time asking a question until I could reproduce a problem on supported equipment. I'm just reassured to know I've probably got some breathing space to get my outstanding PCs upgraded before I get hounded off-site, tar'd and feather'd. As I said, "not supported" doesn't necessarily mean "doesn't work," but some software developers have been known to expedite these issues rather more keenly than others, regardless of the inconvenience and expense to users.

I may be being dense, but I thought that was referring to the SIMS client software, not the o/s. So what you're saying is that XP definitely breaks and the SIMS client software will fail to install?

Does anyone know if this upgrade immediately "breaks" Windows XP clients? We're acutely aware that XP is not supported from this point on, but with over 700 PCs on-site and well over 100 SIMS clients, I have to admit that we have a few lower-priority SIMS clients still on XP (ugh, that sounded defensive, didn't it?). "Not supported" doesn't necessarily mean "doesn't work." I just want to know how much flak I'll be getting on Jan 6th. It's not a hardware issue for us, we're just limited to how fast we can deploy W7 upgrades.

Thanks Duke5A, ADMaster! I had considered GP push and that is the way we deploy the base install. However, I'm not fond of tinkering with GP any more than strictly necessary. In any case, GoogleUpdater works very neatly given the tools to work with; it's just a shame that Google didn't provide neater solutions for Enterprise users. Good news is that I located the "official" update host list buried in Google's documentation somewhere or other. It looks like this: http://cache.pack.google.com/edgedl/chrome/win/ http://www.google.com/dl/chrome/win/ https://dl.google.com/chrome/win/ http://dl.google.com/chrome/win/ http://dl.google.com/chromeos/ http://google.com/dl/chrome/win/ I could have whitelisted these, but better news is that one of my technicians dusted off his SQUID acl knowledge and worked out how to identify browser + Google Update traffic, so that our proxy now has this on bypass. Apparently he's done this before with BOINC traffic, although I didn't realize it. Chrome now updates fine at any time of day and the students don't even notice. By the way, GoogleUpdate.adm is essential to set the proxy URL in GP and there is no other obvious way of doing it. Reading the web indicates that loads of people assume that the Updater uses the same settings page as Chrome (well, you would, wouldn't you?), whereas in fact, the settings are quite separate. When you begin to appreciate that GoogleUpdater performs for a whole suite of apps, not just Chrome, you start to realize why.

Yes Matt, you're on the right lines. You need to talk to your ISP (I'm assuming school, not home). They need to provide you with a public IP address. They need to open port(s) into your internal network, specifically to the internal host address of your HAP server (probably ports 80 and 443). Then you need an A entry in your public DNS record named with a useful name and pointing at your public IP address. Then when someone types the public name of your HAP server into their browser, they will connect to your public address and the firewall will re-route (re-address) the packets to your internal host address. Tell me which bits (if any) you don't grok.

I know I've seen an answer to this somewhere, but I can't find it now that I need it, so... When we installed Chrome, we targetted Updater at our LEA's ISA server (which is/was an unauthenticated proxy). Setting up the proxy was fiddly (in the GP bolt-on), but we got the hang of it after a while and it worked a treat. Now, we've changed ISPs to Virgin and we no longer have a top-level proxy, only our internal proxies which need authentication to traverse. We've changed the proxy address in GP, but, problem, there is nowhere to put a username/password to authenticate the updater traffic. So how do you trick Updater to store an authentication pair, to traverse the proxy - deployable solution preferred, obviously? Alternatively, how do you find out which hosts Updater needs to update, so I can put them in Squid's whitelist?

For some while, we've used SynchronEyes in several computer labs, without really solving the annoying multicast traffic problem. When we first piloted the software, we solved the flooding traffic using IGMP Snooping on our NetGear smart switches. This lasted as long as we had only one lab equipped with SynchronEyes. As soon as we started adding more installations, the multicast traffic spread across our network. I guess this makes sense, because every SynchonEyes group uses the same multicast address, so Snooping can't separate the groups into islands of activity. Currently, I'm half-way through reviewing and upgrading the network to add PoE, and solve a few issues - so I'm looking at this problem again. Has anyone cracked this multicast filtering problem? I'm wondering about using ACL rules, but concerned about breaking normal traffic. We have a L3 switch/router and I suppose we could split labs onto separate VLANs/subnets, but I'm hoping to avoid getting that complex. This isn't helped by Smart being so vague about multicasting - it would have been helpful if you could reassign SynchronEyes groups to different multicast groups (?). Any constructive ideas, please?

Many thanks Vikpaw. My kludge seems to work for now, so I'll let it run for a while and see if we get any complaints. I think I can confirm your assessment of the wierd behaviour of MyDocs when you map it to a server, and now apparently when you don't too... Somehow it needs a kickstart before it appears; logging off is sufficient to do this in the case of server redirection. What I hadn't appreciated is that a SIMS startup is not sufficient to kickstart it, for some even wierder reason. Tombry, I would love my users to create archive documents as PDF, but in some cases I would have difficulty explaining what is meant by archive and why PDF is desirable. I can see them saving everything as PDF and then telling us they can't edit them. Such is life...

Yes, correct, SIMS starts up fine and a check reveals that the special SIMS folders in MyDocs are not created (when it goes wrong). I had another example this morning - as before, the folders were not created, but manually creating "My SIMS Documents" seemed to free the log-jam. I'm currently testing a script patch to test/add the folder when the SIMS launch script runs. For info, staff have roaming profiles and the MyDocs folder is created on each individual PC (in the profile as per default). I've noticed that, when the MyDocs folder is empty (as-in the user never saved anything on the current PC), it also doesn't exist in the profile. Could this be significant? Saving something in MyDocs invokes the creation of the folder in the profile, so there is an additional step involved. By the way, this is a naff way of using roaming profiles and I don't recommend it. We're seriously thinking of using mandatory profiles for staff, to reduce confusion and problems. And no, the SIMS drive must be mapped correctly, otherwise the launch script is not visible (and won't run obviously), because it is located on the mapped drive.

More useful tips, Vikpaw, some of which I will chase up later - but meantime some experiments have allowed me to home in on the problem. Firstly, I may have misled you somewhat. The SIMS clients are almost all XPpro, although we have one W7x64 client on pilot. Also, the staff use free roaming profiles, but the MyDoc folder is not redirected. Anyway, I made close observations of a number of SIMS client PCs this afternoon (staff workroom). Three worked perfectly. The fourth worked fine using my personal staff logon, but failed using an administrator logon. Starting with a clean profile (nothing in MyDocs), what should happen when you startup SIMS, is that SIMS should firstly create "My SIMS Documents" and then folder "{surname firstname}" below that, populated with a {username}.xml file. Thirdly, it creates "tempSimsRpt" and populates it with some template files. Except that, when the issue arose, it had failed to create any of these folders and files. I checked permissions and found no reason why it couldn't create the folders. Then I tried manually creating just "My SIMS Documents" and it all began to work okay (created the rest of the structure). Unfortunately, this wasn't repeatable - deleting the folders didn't stop it working, because SIMS had no trouble recreating them this time - and I haven't found any more that don't work yet. I might try scripting a folder creation in the SIMS launch script (we've used a launch script for many years, initially motivated by the need to log and monitor usage and predating Capita's user list in system manager by some while).

I'm grateful for your help vikpaw & meastaugh1; sorry for the slow response, but I've been off ill the end of last week. No, probably not disk quota problems - as you say, same user has different symptoms on different PCs. Vikpaw, all useful and some of what you say gets me thinking. The documents are bog-standard .DOC files, Office is fully up-to-date (WSUS) and I'm reasonably confident it isn't a document server issue. But we upgraded our domain to accomodate Windows 7 deployment over the summer and we changed the redirection strategy amongst other things. Since then, I've noticed that when a user logs onto a PC for the first time (since the summer changes), the session sometimes behaves strangely, particularly regarding My Documents and redirection. Now this might tie up, because I see that linked documents are opened in a subfolder in My Documents\My SIMS Documents\{user's name}. Conceivably, if the session is struggling with My Documents, it may be unable to create the subfolder and therefore throw a wobbly opening the document. Capita could have avoided this sort of complication by opening documents in %TMP%, but I suppose they have their reasons(?).

Our SEN manager has discovered how to link Word documents into the SEN Detail page of student records (panel 3, Basic SEN Details). This worked fine on her PC, but when she demonstrated it to someone on another PC, instead of the document opening in Word, it prompted to Save in some semi-random folder. The sub-window has two buttons, View (to open in read-only) and Open (to open editable) - both fail the same. I've checked this out and a moderate number of our PCs do this. It certainly seems to be a property of the PC, not the user, and re-installing SIMS client doesn't seem to help. My next thought was to verify that documents open correctly on a double-click (outside of SIMS) - this works fine on all the PCs. Now I've run out of ideas and I haven't got a clue how the linkage functions. I suspect the same problem would occur with any linked documents in SIMS - except that as far as I am aware, no one else is doing this (they haven't complained to me, anyway). The problem is spoiling SENs strategy to deploy information, because she doesn't want people saving documents all over the place, to read them - this increases the risk of out-of-date information persisting. I'd be grateful for a clue on where to look for this! PS: using Office 2007 and seeing the problem on WinXpPro.

Hey! Tried it and ditto, it looks like it might work. SENCO tried it too and she got the result she expected this time (as opposed to the results she wanted, but that's another story). Made her day - she's evidently had a rough week, so she was genuinely grateful for some good news for a change.

With respects, Matt, people have been complaining about the provision of replacement timetable reports for a long time (from soon after Capita announced that NT4 was doomed). We could repost that developers ought to have looked properly at what NT4 provided - and ensured that they reproduced this as a minimum. Whereas in practice, they apparently went off wending their own path, making it difficult or impossible to reproduce then-existing reports. I'm all for providing flexibility - but you must make it easy for people to migrate! Frankly, this didn't happen. We gave up on this some while ago and created our own timetable output on our Intranet (using the approved method of exporting from SIMS overnight). This is way more customizable.

Not at all; feel free to join our peals of laughter! SENCO was promised a reply in April - she was still waiting this week. Plus the chap who gave her the workaround originally, has left Capita, and "his notes have been deleted" -eh?

I've just learned from our SENCO that IEP Writer has broken since the Spring Update and support are being less-than-cooperative in suggesting a solution. The issue relates to a workaround suggested by support last year, to solve the report continuity problem. If you've attempted to use IEP Writer, you will know that creating a new report defaults to a blank form and therefore you have to re-enter any and all of the previous report data to achieve continuity. Either that, or you update the existing report and therefore loose any continuity. This is not acceptable to our SENCO, who requires an electronic audit-trail of reports. The workaround involved loading the previous report data file and thereby overwriting the blank form with the previous report data (saving a whole lot of typing and ticking boxes). Apparently doing this logically was beyond the wit of Capita and before they give me an arguement, may I remind them that they're still marketing this product, according to their website. Since March, this doesn't work any more. Whatever you do, you still end up with a blank form. I've even tried cutting and pasting the data into the IEP student folder, without effect, leading me to suspect they've moved the records somewhere else where I can't find them. Anyone suffered this problem? Anyone know any more than I do?