maniac

I think a lot of the time apparent double standards occur because mods may not be aware of a particular post, afterall there are hundreds of new posts a day on this site, I'd think it pretty impossible for mods to read every single one of them without fail. If I ever see something I consider to be inappropreate I use the 'report this post' button to bring it to someone's attention. Mike.

I really don't see why that suggestion is such a mad idea? Yes it's different from the norm, and requires careful administration and a very well designed system to accomodate them, but it's not such a daft idea to allow students to bring in and use their own devices on the school system. We are in the process of designing a new network system for our academy at the moment as part of our new building, and one of the key features of this system is the abilitiy to allow student owed devices onto the system and to allow the access to the resources that the network system has to offer. When the idea was first proposed I was quite against it and argued the point fearcely, but when I actually examined why I was against it, it was nothing to do with the pinciple of it, it was purely because I thought it would cause me and my team more work. Thing is if you take that as a reason for being against an idea it's actually not a very good one so I quickly changed my stance. All the other aspects such as security, virus risk, charging the devices, insurance, providing the services to the device, what heppens if it doesn't work, who's responsible for the maintenance etc. can all be addressed, so there really is no good reason why students own devices can't be incorporated into school networks, as long as it is done in a correct and proper manner in my opinion. Mike.

If people don't like the way a forum is moderated why are they here?

You can do a very basic check on a fiber run with two people and a torch, that will prove that the fibre isn't broken. Did you renew the patch leads with the switches? If so check they are the correct type for your fixed fibre, they will be either 62.5/125 or 50/125 and it will be printed on the outer casing of both fibres. IT would also be worth checking the logs on the switch is its managed, as it's may be possible that there was a high number of errors on the fiber port which may lead some switches to disable the port - hence the reason it worked for a short while then stopped. Also it would be worth trying a different switch, and maybe swapping out the fibre modules - it's not unheard of for these to be faulty out the box - I've had a new one that was faulty before. Assuming it all checks out, i.e correct patch leads and no error logs and a different switch or fibre module renders the same results, then get the company out - they should guaruntee the fiber for a certain period of time after installation - up to 25years in some cases. They'll be able to bung a tester on it and find out what the problem is with ease if they're any good and if there is a fault they shouldn't charge. If there isn't a fault, then they may do depending on the company. We use a local company for all our cabling who will pop in for free and test cables/fibers if we think there's any issues. (We do give them quite a bit of business however.) Mike.

Quite a lot of the points he raises in that article are actually key parts of our new system design. Opensource software - yes, lots of it and the latest batch of machines won't have MS office on them here as a trial. Of course there's always going to be some licenses needed, but we actually have students chosing to use open office because 'that's what they have at home' Web based applications - where possible yes! Keeping older hardware in use longer - definitely - we have 5yr old desktops that are planned to be around for at least another 2 years, and we are investing heavily in terminal server based systems for our new system. Allowing students own devices - a given for our new system. Any device that can run JAVA apps is basically capable of being used as a terminal on most remote desktop systems, and if you spend some time setting things up properly, the students end device is totally isolated on the network and thus the virus risk is very small. There's no doubt about it times are changing, funding is drying up and thus schools approaches to money hungry resources like ICT will have to change as there simply won't be the money to, for example, religiously replace all your end devices every 3 or 4 years etc. In my opinion anyone who believes that in 5 yrs time your average school network will still be following the same model that they do now, or that the cuts won't affect them should stop kidding themselves.

Aye - they're fine for lightweight stuff, or you can get the wall anchors which are better for heavier stuff. My house was built in 1880, so nice solid bricks! I've got a 14.4v Bosch cordless drill I brought the week I moved in, and it's the best thing I ever brought, it even drives a 14mm bit through two layers of brick with ease - although it does drain the battery quite quick. Generally speaking you get what you pay for with powertools, buy a cheap drill and that's all it'll ever be.

Apologies, didn't notice your reply until today! Glad you got it working in the end. Mike.

We use quotas on our students, just to prevent them using up all our space with MP3's, images or videos, so they are quite libral. 250mb year 7 500m year 8 1GB year 9 1.5GB year 10 3 GB year 11 + 6th form Students get a warning e-mail at 75% use, 90% use and 95% use, they cannot go over their quota. Staff have a 10gb soft quota, the system will e-mail them every week when they are over it, and attach automatically a report showing big files, duplicate files and files that haven't been accessed for over a year - this should help them clean up their space, however most choose to ignore it. Works for us, and pretty much looks after itself. Mike.

We have the client program installed on all 500 of our student desktops - about 75% of these are wireless laptops. It works fine with wireless machines, as long as the controlling teachers machine is hardwired - if the teachers machine and the students machines are all on wireless in the same area, I've found the reliability to be sketchey. We get the ocassional problem with machines dropping off on wireless, but as soon as the machine is logged back on, it latches into the lanschool console automatically, unlike Net support school based products where the teacher had to manually add dropped workstations - this is a substantial improvement on RM/Ranger/Netsupport. I've not noticed any impact on the network or performance of the clients with lanschool on - it's a very small program when it's running. The only thing I will add is the workstation remote control aspects of it are't quite as good as the net support based products - the movement of the mouse and sending of keystrokes to the client is much slower than Net Support, but I guess you can't have everything. We don't use the program much for control more for monitoring so it didn't worry us. Workstations react instantly to other commands like locking the screens etc. It's only the remote control features that have a bit of lag to them. Mike.

Either that, or you can use student lists which seeks out the students by login name instead of the machines. We use that in some areas where we have laptops shared between rooms, so they could be in use in two different lessons at the same time.

OK, that particular article suggests that all ICT provision could be delivered that way, which is perhaps a step too far, but the idea and principal of allowing students to bring in their own devices to use at school is not actually a bad one in my opinion. Yes and yes - but I don't see a problem with this, it's just a different approach.

Of course your specialist areas would still have to have dedicated machines, but, at least in this school, a majority of machines are just used for net browsing and typing stuff in word which can be done through a browser or TS session. Whatever happens, I think allowing the proper integration of students own devices is an absolute must for any new ICT infrastructure, which is why the designs for our new system revolve around this very principle. Anyway, this is offtopic from the origenal post - I think there's a whole new thread in it's own right to be had around this topic.

Easy, you have a guest wireless network with a web authentication form for the students, together with massive investment in web applications and terminal services. This is a way forwards, I wouldn't dissmiss it as the simple fact is schools are not going to be able to afford to supply the amount of ICT equipment they currently do or have the money to regularly replace, update and renew this equipment like they do at the moment, so something's got to change. The solution - invest massively in your backend and ability to supply a secure connection to users own end device, deliver as much as possible using web applications, and have terminal servers available for those programs and services that can't be delivered over the web. Then you encourage and allow students to bring in and use their own devices. If it's setup right, it doesn't matter if the students device has a virus on it, as the devices shouldn't be able to see each other, and because the services are delivered via the web, any potential virus shouldn't be able to propogate back to the server. Best way to think of it is like BTopenzone for your school. Mike.

Have you thought about subscribing to an on-line secure backup service - this removes the need for drives to be swapped etc. and holds your data securely off-site. 40GB is a relatively small amount of data, so should be possible to back this up over your net connection overnight - once one full backup has completed, differential backups after this should be relatively quick. Our LEA offers this service, they backup our SIMS server for us as it was cheaper than buying the SQL addon for Backupexec. Might be worth looking at. Mike.

Not sure I could possibly cover the way all our GPOS work in a forum post, it's taken many months of fine tuning of policies to get what we have. Essentially most of them are user policies, the only machine policies are those that need to be like WSUS settings, offline file settings etc. Students policiy is very strict with a lot of settings configured, but carefully done to avoid duplicate settings - the more settings you have turned on the longer the policy takes to apply. Staff have less strict settings with only the essentials set like IE home page, proxy settings and a few others. Admin staff are the same as teaching staff, there is no difference for us. If you're reconfiguring an inherited system, what I would do is create an entirely seperate OU in your active directory with 1 test machine in, 1 staff user and 1 student user in seperate OU's - you can then build your new GPOs seperately from your main network and test them throughly before applying them to your active users and machines. It will take a while to fine tune them, it took me several days to get our initial configuration and I'm constantly making adjustments to improve things, plug security holes or remove restrictions that might be cuasing problems - it's a careful balancing act between locking the system down to stop the students creating havoc, but leaving enough freedom to allow the machines to be effectively used. Also one big tip, if you change something - back the policies up first and document what you change as you go. Ocassionally you'll change a setting and it will mess something up but you might not immediatly realise it, then you'll want to change it back, but it's not always easy to remember precisely what you changed sometimes. Also don't make too many changes in one go when troubleshooting. When working with Group Policies, an invaluable tool is the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) add on which allows much better management of GPOs. Mike.

Prefered the old layout. Felt a bit lost this morning, as BBC news is my site of choise for keeping up to date with what's going on - it's just not as easy to find what you want any more! I have no doubt I'll get used to it, but I have to ask how many times does the BBC need to redesign its site? This must be at least the 3rd incarnation in recent times, and how much does it cost each time they do it I wonder! Mike.

OK I've sperated this out. 'SPIRES ACADEMY STUDENT WORKSTATION STARTUP SCRIPT 'Wirtten by M.Redman July 2009 'Based on Origenal Script written for NBC in 2007 by M.Redman 'Version 2.20 'This script works by doing the following: '1. Checks to see if the version number specified exists, if it does then it bypasses the whole icon section of the script. If it doesn't or is different it goes to copy icons as below; '2. Checks to see if icongroups folder exists, if it doesn't it creates it '3. The entire old icon cache is deleted ready for a fresh copy if it exists '4. Main set of icons are copied from a central storage location '5. Other Icon groups are copied from individual storage locations based on OUs the machines are in '6. Creates the version number file so the script knows the latest set of icons exists on the local machine. '7. Additional icons are copied on an individual basis by looking for certain program files on the local machine. 'YOU WILL NEED TO USE XCACLS TO ALTER THE PERMISSIONS ON THE LOCAL FOLDER TO STOP STUDENTS SAVING TO IT 'OR PRE-CREATE THE FOLDER WITH THE CORRECT PERMISSIONS SET, AND ALTER THE SCRIPT ACCORDINGLY. Const OverWriteFiles = True Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") 'ICON DELIVERY 'Set Version number dim strfile ' ##################### ' # To Copy new icons # ' # Increment the # ' # value Below. # ' ##################### ' ### MODIFY BLOW THIS LINE ONLY ### strfile="v1.40" ' ### DO NOT MODIFY BELOW THIS LINE ### 'Check to see if version file exists if it does, whole icon section is bypassed. If Not objFSO.FileExists("c:\ICONGROUPS\STUDENTS\" & strfile) then 'Check to see is Icon folders exist, if not create folder If Not objFSO.FolderExists("c:\ICONGROUPS") then objFSO.CreateFolder("c:\ICONGROUPS") end if 'Delete old icon cache if it exists If objFSO.FolderExists("c:\ICONGROUPS\STUDENTS") then objFSO.DeleteFolder("C:\ICONGROUPS\STUDENTS"),TRUE end if 'Copy global icons from server objFSO.CopyFolder "\\spires\netlogon\ICON BANK\MAIN" , "C:\ICONGROUPS\STUDENTS" , OverWriteFiles 'Setup for reading machine OU and copy extra ocons according to OU membership. Set objWshNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network") Set objAdsSystemInfo = CreateObject("adsysteminfo") Set objComputerName = GetObject("LDAP://" & objAdsSystemInfo.ComputerName) Set objOU = GetObject(objComputerName.Parent) strOU = replace(objOU.Name,"OU=","") 'For each Case statement, a seperate folder can exist Select Case strOU Case "Room 22" objFSO.CopyFolder "\\spires\netlogon\ICON BANK\Room22" , "C:\icongroups\students" , OverWriteFiles Case "Room 25" objFSO.CopyFolder "\\spires\netlogon\ICON BANK\MATHS" , "C:\icongroups\students" , OverWriteFiles End Select 'Create version number txt file Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile("c:\ICONGROUPS\STUDENTS\" & strFile) END IF 'Copy Icons for specific programs that may be installed anywhere 'PINNACLE If objFSO.FileExists("C:\pinnacle\Program\Programs\Studio.exe") then If Not objFSO.FOLDERExists("C:\ICONGROUPS\STUDENTS\STARTMENU\PROGRAMS\Pinnacle") then objFSO.CopyFolder "\\spires\netlogon\ICON BANK\Pinnacle" , "C:\icongroups\students" , OverWriteFiles end if end if 'FIREFOX If objFSO.FileExists("c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe") then If Not objFSO.FILEExists("C:\ICONGROUPS\STUDENTS\STARTMENU\PROGRAMS\Mozilla Firefox.lnk") then objFSO.CopyFolder "\\spires\netlogon\ICON BANK\Firefox" , "C:\icongroups\students" , OverWriteFiles end if end if It's very important that you use this in conjunction with XCACLS to keep a check on the folder permissions so the students can't save to the desktop or startmenu. Our machines run XCACLS every startup to check the folder permissions are correct. This process only take a few seconds to run. Because the whole script is written to check for certain files first, it only copies data over the network if the local machine actually needs it otherwise it skips over the sections not needed in a fraction of a second. I've trimmed this down lots - you have a couple of examples of each type of icon distribution I use in this script. Mike.

You can, but you'll have to give me a few minutes to seperate it out of our massive startup script as it's one giant script that does a ton of different things. Check back shortly . . .

We ordered them as a kit from Misco so I didn't get much choise in the speakers - I kinda assumed they should work well together as they were being sold as a kit.

Using some VBS magic which checks a central location at startup to see if there's any icons that need copying over, if there are it copies them from the central store to the local folder. I've been doing it this way for years and it works brilliantly. You can get really clever with the coding as well so the script builds a customised icon set for the machine using "if xyz.exe exists then copy this icon" type statements meaning the minute you roll out new software to a set of workstations, the icon is automatically copied by the script - no manual intervention needed.

2 Things that might improve things: Re-direct your start menu and desktop to local folders instead of a network location - that sorts out loads of problems with things like that. Optimise your group policies, make sure un-necessary policies are not set as the more policies that are set, the slower the login time. Mike.

I have the job title of Network Manager, but at the moment I'm doing more first line technicians work than anything else.

Anyone got a Xerox Phaser 8560 printer, and care to give me some honest feedback. We're currently looking at buying one of these as a good quality colour printer for our Enterprise area to replace the rather old HP one we have at the moment. Never brought one of the solid ink printers before, so I'm keen to work out if there's any gotchas with it that I need to consider before buying one. Also what are the running costs like compared to a traditional laser printer? Cheers Mike

I'm glad you posted this - I was getting the same problem while rebuilding a laptop from scratch last week. I found it also made IE totally un-responsive. The solution I've found was to install all updates apart from IE8, then do IE8 seperately afterwards, that seemd to work for me. Mike.

I haven't really been on 'holiday' as such for years and years, but I do goto music festivals - to me that's a sort of holiday as it's doing something I enjoy, and I do go and see friends I have that live in far off corners of this country fairly often, which are mini holidays in their own right. I can understand why people want to go abroad and spend £1000's on a holiday as there are some fantastic places to visit abroad, and if you've got the money to then great. What I don't understand are those people who pay for the whole thing on a credit card, then struggle to pay it back - same thing with those people who spend £1000's at christmas on credit then struggle to pay it back - why put yourself through that, if you can't afford it then don't do it - simples! Mike.