NifeWrench

We recently bought ourselves a 3D printer with SteamTRAX curriculum for a couple of our science classes. This was a pretty large sum of money for us and I'm running into conflicting opinions in our administration on who should be allowed to use the printer. My question to anyone who currently has a 3D printer is what is your policy on 3D printer use? Do you allow students to print their own personal (school appropriate) items or do you limit use of the printer to strictly be used by specific classes? Also, how often would you say the printer is used directly for a classroom lesson? Thanks in advance.

I looked into the encoder and it was replaced by the expression encoder which looks like it may be perfect for what I need. Very easy to use. Now lets just hope our computers from 2003 are up to the task. I wish I could get them to prerecord it and drop it onto a server but they're pretty set on doing it live.

Hi Everybody, I'm looking for a way to do streaming morning announcements to the school. All of our classrooms have Smartboards and speaker systems and our old intercom is just not up to the task anymore. Is there a simple way to do this or should I just get on fixing the sound system in the next 2 weeks. I've screwed around with vlc but I think it may be too complicated. Any suggestions would be great. Thanks.

Sorry to resurect an old topic but I'm having some permission errors when the script run on certain computer and certain accounts. I was wondering if anyone else had this happen and if they had a fix for it. Or if anyone is using another similar solution.

I can remote desktop into it just fine by using the IP and get access to the core config. It just seems like the MMC can't use ip's, it requires the hostname. Is there a way to ingrain that a certain hostname will always point to a certain IP? Perhaps some sort of DNS on the client computer that I'm using to manage it so it never even asks the DNS to resolve the hostname? **Edit** I think I may have it. I may just need to edit the host file on the client to point to the server. I'll try it tomorrow and see if it works. ***Edit 2*** Yup editing the host file worked out just fine.

Hi, I've been going around in circles with hyper-v server (the standalone one) all day and I finally figured out my problem but alas have no solution. background: I'm setting up a domain controller and a file/print server as vm's on our new server. I have one domain controller right now that is only a test DC in place until the virtual machines are up and running. My problem is that to get access the hyper-v server I need to use the management tool from another PC. I used the hvremote.wsf to get all the configurations correct. From there I tried many times to connect using the servers ip address and name however it would only work after I went to my test DC and added a record to the servers address. The DNS server however will cease to be after I get the new virtual DC up and running. so therein lies my problem. Do I set up a new small, perhaps open source, dns server to handle the communication for just these 2 devices? any help would be appreciated.

I finally got a second hand server that we recieved from a closed school running (dual xeon 2.4ghz 4gig with a raid 5 hot swap configuration) I think I'm going to try to put ESXi on it tomorrow and try out some virtual machines. This should be good enough for at least a domain controller or two right? I still think I'll try to pick up another server for the file storage/other stuff and maybe look into a SAN now. Thanks for all the help guys I'll keep you informed on how it goes. EDIT: Forgot to mention that we don't have to worry about e-mail or filtering, our isp takes care of both of those for us.

Thanks for all the advice. I was trying to keep the budget down as far as possible but judging from what you guys are saying it's not worth doing unless it's done right. I'll definitely get in contact with hp or dell and find out what they recommend for my situation and I'll have to look into hyper V. I've never had the opportunity to use it. The only real virtualization I've done has been vmware on freebsd and it's been a while since I set that up. I really appreciate all the help thanks.

I have been playing with Openfiler over the past few days on a couple of test boxes and it has been slightly tricky to get going. It may just be the low power of the machine, but after I got it setup to recognize the AD users properly it became horribly slow and I couldn't even browse the navigation in the web app. I've read a few other people who had the same issue with no fixes as far as I've seen. Aside from getting all this set up I'm basically the only official tech support for the whole school. So ease of setup and maintainability is a HUGE factor since there's a lot of other stuff to do. As far as why we're just now getting servers, I can't really tell you why it took so long. I just got this job about a month ago and this was one of my main platforms from the interview. Up until now it's been nothing but single, barely managed, mostly antivirus-less, computers all over the school. Just doing my best to sort it all out.

We are a K-12 school with around 600 students and around 75 staff members. I am in charge of implementing our first servers. My plan is to start slow and get AD set up for the staff and the high school which would only be around 400 people. I was hoping to get a little advice from you guys about which servers to use. My plan so far was one of these as a domain controller Systemax ELS Server Intel Xeon Quad-Core x3360 4GB DDR2 ECC 250GB (3 x 250GB RAID 5) DVDRW Dual GB LAN Free DOS 981149 at Global Gov/Ed and either 2 or these as file servers with Windows Server 2003 Visionman 3U Rackmount RAID 5 Server - Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 2.53GHz, 2GB DDR2-800, 3x250GB SATA II -RAID5, DVDRW -LS, Quad Gigabit LAN, NO OS, Rails Included ARSI-2I3210 at Global Gov/Ed or One NAS Sans Digital AccuNAS AN104LB 4 Hot Swap Bay 1U Dual GigaLan RAID Storage at Global Gov/Ed I'm a little worried about the NAS since I've never had to integrate a linux box into a windows domain. My main concern however is if this stuff will be powerful enough to handle about 75-100 computers at any given time. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Just came here to introduce myself. Just took over the Technology Coordinator position at our school and am sure I will have many questions and hope to give any advice I can.