maniac

Full assets register, everything gets logged into it. Computers, Monitors, Laptops, Printers, Scanners and other misc hardware as well. Everything gets a barcoded sticker which is then it's asset number for the duration that piece of equipment is in the academy. All recorded to an in house written PHP based system which is fully searchable and also lets us build up logs for each asset so we can see when items have had bits replaced, or machines have been re-imaged etc. We don't store machine specs, but we can get these out of FOG if we require them. Mike.

Tax the rich to much then they tend to jump ship and move abroad, so you then lose your revenue stream from their taxes. They also tend to take their businesses with them meaning the country loses out on employment created by them, taxes paid by them etc. etc. it's a very fine balancing act. Good example of what happens when you tax the rich is what happened to the state of new Jersey in America N.J. loses $70B in wealth during five years as residents depart | NJ.com Mike.

Metcheck rekons it'll be sat afternoon before Kent sees any, although it keeps changing. It wasn't predicting any in the next 7 days as of yesterday.

Can you run a resultant set of policies on the workstation using GPMC and see what the results are, it will tell you what policy is 'winning' when they are applied and what it is setting on the machine, there could be a problem somewhere along the line which is messing things up. I must admit I tend to add in specific programs using the hash rules as oppose to path rules as I've had more success with these personally, software restrictions has done some right weird things to some of my workstations in the past. Mike.

Believe me, a teachers salary does not allow you a luxurious life, but it does allow you to live comfortably.

This is actually my post being advertised, as I'm moving into other roles within our shared services structure. For more information, please see the Spires Academy website. Vacancy - Network Manager Please contact Ian Roscow (ICT Group Manager) at the Folkestone Academy for more information, or feel free to PM me if you'd prefer. Mike.

Loxit sell everything you need. Buy two of these kits: Laptop Trolleys and Cabinets from Loxit. The Lapbank laptop Charging Kit for 20 Laptops. Also Networking and Secure Docking Options. Lapbank Notebook Trolleys for Best Security, Best Quality, Best Value for Money. And 2 of these (they have 2 outputs on each, so you can run 2 x 10 way leads from the above kit from each one) Soft Start and Surge Protection for Loxit's Lapbank Range of Laptop Trolleys and laptop safes. For up to 24 Laptops. Electronically Phases the Start Up of Multiple Laptop Charging to Prevent Power Spikes and Conditions the Mains Input Prevents any El That will give you enough for 40. For ventilation, you can easily mount a standard small bathroom extractor inside the unit to extract hot air - the cupboard which contained the server at one of my previous schools had this done and it was surprisingly effective - fan at the top and 2 vents at the bottom meant you got a good flow of air through the cupboard. The big question is, is it worth that much effort when you can quite easily buy ready made cabinets which you just plug in and go.

DIY is fine if you take your time. It's taken me a year to fit my kitchen in my place.

That reminds me of the time my dad drilled straight through a cable when putting up a curtain pole about 20 years ago. Their house still had the old fuses so there was an almighty blue flash before it blew (Don't don't get that these days with modern RCDs) melted the drill bit in the process. Repair was easy enough, but when we thought about it, only a week before he'd brought a new drill, a plastic one - his old one was an old fashioned metal drill so if he'd still had the old drill he'd have got a very nasty shock - lucky escape that was considering mum had been nagging him for months to do that job! Of course there were two ironic things about that job, not only had he plugged his drill into the very socket the cable he drilled through fed, but because of the design of the room there was a socket on the other side of the window and yep, his marking out would have achieved the same result again had he not realised!

Did our school logo one by hacking apart the standard windows XP screensaver and replacing the graphic

Introduced papercut here 18months ago, and reduced my toner bill from around £18k to just 5k in a year. It came as part of a network overhaul, so I just did it and introduced it to the staff. It got complaints, but overall people have accepted it now. Unfortunitely print costs are starting to rise again this year, but we have got more teaching staff and an increased role so it's expected. I also scrapped all inkjet printers and re-distributed what we had more effectively round the building - in 18 months I've only had to buy 1 new printer. For copiers, we tend to buy them and then pay maintenance on them on a per copy basis which is about 0.4p per page for B/W and 4p per page colour. This covers parts, labour and toner and is from a local firm just down the road so if we need service they're usually here the same day.

The dell ones are a pain as there's actually 3 wires and not two and their power supplies are very finiky due to a controller chip inside them. This is one of the main reasons I'm moving away from Dell as my main laptop supplier as a lot of my power packs have failed over the last 2 years due to the chips inside them becoming faulty and the laptops refusing to charge as a result. For the mains leads, how many do you need as I may have some spares lying around you can have as we've replaced so many in the last 2 years it's not funny.

CRC errors are to do with the network interface, so it may be worth checking out obvious things like the switch and network cables as there's every chance this issue might be nothing to do with Fog, but something else entirely. Not sure why it would corrupt the image thou, but I don't know an awful lot about the way FOG works in the background. Have you tried one of the older kernels just in case it makes a difference?

Try a different kernel, I've had this on certain laptops we have which don't like some of the newer kernels. I downloaded one of the older ones and told these particular laptops to use that and it solved the problems for me. Mike.

Our previous whiteboard installers loved the twist and tape method for all connections, USB, Audio leads and even power leads for speakers! Hence a majority of our speakers have aweful buzzing on the audio that I just don't have time to go round and sort out properly.

Been there, it's not good! However not too tricky to fix yourself if you get a big enough hole in the plaster to give some flexibility in the pipes, then just use a push and fit join and all's good again. If you don't fancy leaving the push and fit joint as a permanent fix, it would do you as a temporary one until you can get it fixed properly. (My pipe was in the floor, drilled through it when fitting a door thingy between the bathroom and kitchen.)

Anyone know how to add a NIC driver to the Fog kernel? We have a few new machines with a Jmicron network card in, which doesn't appear to be supported by any of the current kernels. I've got a linux driver for the card, but I don't understand how compressed linux images work (my knowledge of Linux is not that indepth) so any guidence on how to add it would be really helpful!

Well I heard fairy Tale of New York by the Pogues for the first time this year on the radio today, by next week I'll be fed up with it so I may as well enjoy it for a week.

We us papercut here, and I just used some VB script to copy the client program to all my workstations at startup. As we have a lot of wireless laptops, 20 or 30 of them all trying to run the client from the network share at login was causing a bit of a bottleneck. It does cause a little bit of an issue when they upgrade it, but with a little tweaking of the script I get it to compare the .exe file and to re-copy the client files if there's a newer version on the server. I've found papercut to be very intuative to use, and needed to read very little of its documentation to get it working. We've gone quite far with its implementation here, we have release queues for the students to print, no more that 3 copies of a doucment, restrictions on printing the same document within 60 seconds (to stop people bypassing the 3 copies rule) and a rule to stop un-saved work being printed (To make sure students save their work before printing) We also use print credits for staff and students and we are quite strict with these limits, only handing out extra credit when it's absolutely necessary. Took a bit of getting used to for the staff, and taken us a while to get the formula right for the amount of credits we hand out, but we slashed out toner useage from about £14k in the year before it's introduction to around just 5k last year, a massive saving. (Some of that was also due in part to scrapping pretty much all our inkjet printers at the same time.) The only non-restricted staff members are Admin, because of the mailmerge letters they do, and senior management who have restrictions on what they can print, but no credit limit on the account. Even we have the same limits as everyone else, although we hardly print anything. All in all it works very well.

WOW, another smile customer I've had an account with them since about 2000 I think, they were unique in their time. I currently only have to use the pin pad when transfering money outside of smile accounts. I've only used it once in the year or so I've had it, which caught me out completely as it was still packed in a box from moving. Cue frantic searching of boxes to locate it!

The best way, if you've got the time, is to change your wireless authentication to use a RADIUS server with machine only authentication. Not only can you then distribute the wireless settings via Group Policy, but you can also control very easily who does and doesn't have access to your wireless network.

Smile - the online bank from the co-op issued these a while back. http://news.co-operativebank.co.uk/img/C762/reader.jpg They work differently to the lloyds one as they only respond to a simple string of numbers the on-line banking site puts out. Still an inconvenience, but better than the lloyds design it would seem.

My mum used to make a great bannofee pie, not had it for years thou. Have to see if I can talk her into making it again sometime.

I've got around 30 or so PCs plugged directly into our Core switch, as it's fully populated with modules so it seemed silly not to take advantage of that fact.

Brillant, that's what I was after, thanks.