IanIsBaffledAgain

Hi, Thanks for all the replies. We're very small, about 350 pupils, of which about 80 are boarders. The fact that there are boarders creates quite a lot of extra work. Also, we have a wide age range of pupils, from nursery right through to sixth-form and, once again, this seems to make for more work as there's a wide range of software needed. I appreciate that the range of costs between schools is likely to be high but am interested in what the range might be. Cheers, Ian. Cheers, Ian.

Hi, I work for a small independent school and want to make the case to the bursar for some more IT staff hours. The trouble is that I have no idea what, on average, schools are paying for IT provision, in particular staffing costs. I appreciate that this may be a very difficult, even impossible, thing to calculate due to the many different ways in which schools manage their IT provision. But can we come up with an approximate range, expressed 'per pupil', for IT staffing costs in schools? Thanks, Ian.

I feel your pain Chuckster. My distrust of NTBackup got to such proportions that I was driven to write my own backup utility. Pardon my ignorance but I'm interested in why people still need tape backup in these days of multi-terabyte HDDs. Am I missing something? Cheers, Ian.

I don't remember the detail I'm afraid but we never got our Smartcache to work properly with non-domain machines, however hard we, and RM, tried. As I remember it the problem was something similar - everyone got default policy - it didn't seem to be able to recognise the machine and there was no option for the user to authenticate with domain credentials. We switched to a Sophos WS500 and all the problems went away.

What OS are the servers running?

I've got a test domain rig where the (single) DC is Server2008 R2 and there are some XP (SP3) workstations. Following a reset of a user's password (eg using AD U&C, at the DC) something very strange happens. The user can still log onto an XP workstation with the old password. This only works once. The next logon attempt brings up the familiar 'The system could not log you on...' dialogue and only the new password will do. The new password works on the first logon attempt too, by the way. So you only see this if you attempt to use the old password after it's been changed. Some other observations: (1) As far as I can tell this is a time-dependent issue. If you leave long enough (not sure exactly, but maybe > 10 minutes) between the reset and the subsequent logon attempt the problem seems to have gone away and you get the 'system could not log you on' dialogue. (2) The problem does not seem to be present if the user logs onto a Server 2003 domain machine. (3) The initial session often, but not always, appears compromised insofar as you get a strange warning in the system tray saying 'Windows needs your current credentials'. Clicking this brings up a dialogue telling you to lock and then unlock the machine, presumably so that you can re-authenticate. (4) The problem also occurs, in exactly the same way, if the password reset is done programmatically, via IADsUser::SetPassword(). I've not been able to test this on a rig using Server 2003 DCs (my normal operating conditions) and so can't narrow this down terribly well - sorry. But I just wondered if it might light a bulb in someone's head and I could get a pointer to where to look. Any help much appreciated, Cheers, Ian.

mb2k01, I've found Smoothwall tech support to be very good. As far as I understand it, the Hyper-V issue is, to some extent, beyond their control as it depends in part on Microsoft's willingness to support non-MS OS's as the guest. I'm sure it'll get sorted in time. Hyper-V is still pretty new technology. Cheers, Ian.

Thanks for getting back rjones. What do you use to trigger the start up? I have a thing called WOL - Magic Packet Sender but it's GUI-driven only as far as I'm aware so I can't easily see how to invoke it (with parameters) from the command line. Cheers, Ian.

I'm looking for a simple way of powering up/down workstations on our Windows network according to a pre-defined schedule. So, for example, I can set one suite to power down after the school day and then back up again early in the morning in time to run scans and updates etc. Another suite might be set up similarly but with a later power up time. etc. I've searched for a tool to do this but without success so I've had a quick look at writing something myself and that seems a goer but, as ever with development projects, quite a lot of work. So, before I bury my head in that, anyone know of anything that'll do the job? Ta, Ian.

ZeroHour, Thanks. As I've indicated above, I'm really not keen to have to fire up another box, of whatever type, to run this app. So if I can't get it to play properly with Hyper-V I'll have to look at alternatives - maybe something that sits on top of ISA? Just one other thing - did you get it going with a dynamically expanding disk? Cheers, Ian.

Hi ZeroHour, Many thanks for that. I'll give it a whirl. I saw some mention of this -up switch somewhere and a warning that performance isn't great. Coupled with using the legacy NIC, which MS warn doesn't perform terribly well, it doesn't sound too promising but may be sufficient for a trial. If Tom et al can come up with a driver fix that would be great. I can't be the only person wanting to run this software on Hyper-V... can I? Cheers, Ian.

Tom, Very kind of you to offer a 'tin' but that's not the problem - we have tins but I don't want to switch them back on again - we recently got a monster new HP G5 machine to run Hyper-V making most of them redundant and the server room's now the quietest and coldest it's ever been! Ian.

Thanks for getting back Tom. I've only tried installing Windows OSs on Hyper-V to-date which, perphaps unsurprisingly, goes without a hitch (did I just say that?). As a result I've not taken the trouble to get my head round much of what's going on. I'd be really interested to know if the problems I seemed to be having with the dynamically expanding disk are reproduced on other people's setups or/and if there's a workaround. Using the dynamic disks is such a relief after grappling with the huge files that fixed disks inevitably create. And I'm not seeing performance problems with the dynamic disks so far. I assumed that the problems with the virtual NICs were to do with drivers. I'm trying to trial NetworkGuardian but really don't want to have to fire up any more hardware to run it and Hyper-V is the virtualisation solution we're going with just now. Cheers, Ian.

Hi, I'm trying to install SmoothWall's NetworkGuardian on a Hyper-V VM and having a few issues. First up the installer didn't seem to like the (default) dynamicaly expanding HDD. Having got round that with a fixed size HDD I ran into the problem that it didn't detect the default virtual NIC. Using a 'legacy' virtual NIC appeared to get round that during the install but on reboot the machine hung at the line 'Bring up NIC Port 1', and that's where I'm stuck. Anyone else trying to do this and any ideas? Ta, Ian.