maniac

I think that figure really does depend on what part of the country you are living in, as I'd be right up s**t creek if I only had £14,440 a year to survive on. That works out around £1000 a month after tax - my mortgage and essential bills come to more than that! My house isn't even very big, Victorian 2 up 2 down end of terrace, but the south east is a damned expensive place to buy a house - 1 bed bedsits can cost over £400 a month to rent, even more in popular places like Canterbury.

We're unaffected, but loads of schools in Kent are - even some of the academy schools are labelled 'for discussion' I think we are just a little bit too far down the process of our new build for them to back track now thankfully. I know quite a few people here are not in favour of BSF for various reasons, but for us we really need new premises, we're out growing our current buildings very quickly.

As it was on in the car on the way home. YouTube - Five Finger Death Punch Bad Company

For staff their Desktop is redirected to a subfolder of their my documents, so it makes no difference where they save stuff then. It's quite easy to do, and works a treat and keeps profile sizes tiny. Only problem is gives us is sometimes when syncronising it complains that files are open, as to windows it looks like this folder is being browsed by a user when it's displaying its contents on the desktop, but apart from that it works really reliably. Students have a locked desktop as part of their mandatory profile which they can't save to. Mike.

I used to pull this trick off on the back warehouse stairs of a popular retail company I used to work for. We also used to make slides out the the large amounts of cardboard waste that the departments upstairs generated - we sold large items in big boxes, lay a number of these over the stairs and you've got a slide of epic proportions

Our core switch is knocking on a bit now, but still works well - HP procurve can't recall the model of the top of my head. Over the last 2 years I've been sytematically replacing our edge switches to managed HP procurve ones as and when we've expanded different parts of the network, and I've managed to get rid of a majority of the old Planet switches we had kicking about on the system - although 1 still remains in a distant corner of the network. I've got a few Alled Telleson switches which are years old, but do have GB fibre modules in them so these are my spare in-case-of-failure switches - l also still have some of these in use on the system, but they seem very reliable and fast so until they go wrong they won't be replaced - hopefully they'll see us through to our new building which will have all new switch gear throughout when it's built!

The whole of the Renegades Album by Rage against the machine (the whole album is cover songs for those that don't know) In particular their cover of Bob Dylan - Maggies farm is genius.

I'm quite fond of some of them . . . . Of course, they have little to nothing to do with ICT, but I particularly like the lama.

Oh dear, yet another exploit - see article below. BBC News - Hackers target Microsoft Windows XP support system

Maybe there could be an extension to the existing rep system that ties rep to one of the forums, so you could see for example that a certain person's had 50 points in the windows forum, and 120 points in the linux forum etc. and make your own mind up about the strength of their advice based on that?

Sounds like we'll end up mimicing experts exchange if we went down that route. I've never been keen on ranking members of forums, it starts to devide communities if you're not careful. Rep is different as everyone has an equal chance of earning that, but branding someone as an expert - how would it be judged? How would the community make sure that experts advice is infact good? What happens if someone chosen as an 'expert' offers advice that turns out to be wrong - where does edugeek stand if they appointed them as an expert? Hmm, can of worms me thinks . . . .

I used 3 of the Vision tech connect amps with either their ceiling speakers or wall mounted speakers in our enterprise area that we constructed last year, and overall they've been brilliant. Only critisism is they are a little tinny and lack any real bass response, but for an in-classroom sound system they're very good and plenty loud enough. Kit comes with the right back boxes as well, or buy a tech-connect wall plate and you can fit it in there along side the connections so it's all neatly done in one double backbox. They have two switchable inputs as well, which is handy (not sure if any of the others do, as I've not checked) Mike.

This little script run as a startup script will log the current IP address of a workstation together with the date and time to a log file on the local C:\ With a little bit of tweeking it can be modified to store it on a central server with machine names etc. in seperate log files for each day, or in seperate log files for each machine etc. It's very badly written, I knocked it up sometime ago from various examples of other scripts on the net for a specific purpose when I was doing some troubleshooting, but it works. strcomputer = "." Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _ & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2") Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery _ ("Select * From Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration Where IPEnabled = True") for each objitem in colitems strIPAddress = Join(objitem.IPAddress, ",") next IP = stripaddress strFile = "C:\IPaddressLog.txt" strText = date & " " & time & " " & IP Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") If objFSO.FileExists(strFile) Then Else Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile(strFile) End If Const ForAppending = 8 Set objTextFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile (strFile, ForAppending, True) objTextFile.WriteLine(strText) objTextFile.Close WScript.Quit

Are you looking at replacing those drives with something larger, or adding additional drives to create more space? Either way, any standard SCSI 320 drive should work, capacities are available up to 300GB, although it would be worth checking with Dell technical support if there's any limits on capacities for that particular server. The drives you've got will probably have a listed capacity of 74GB as SCSI drives come in 36, 74, 146 and 300GB capacities generally. If I remember rightly those servers have 5 x 3.5" drive bays, so with 3 in each server alredy you should be able to add 2 more drives to each. I would purchase 2 x 300GB drives per server and set them up in RAID 1 for fault tollerance. You can then move whatever data you want to these drives. The Caddys to hold the drives are easily found on e-bay a lot cheaper than buying them from Dell. If money is a real problem and you need more than 300GB of space, then you could put them in RAID0, but you run the risk of losing data should 1 drive fail. Mike.

Sounds to me like you got a duff HDD - it's one of the risks, if there's any duff sectors on the drive it will stall the FOG image creation process and give all sorts of weird errors but nothing specific to tell you exactly what the trouble is. Try another one of the machines and I'm pretty sure it'll work fine Had this happen to me before which wasted 2 days work I spent perfecting the new image I was going to use.

All is revealed here . . . . BBC News - England match triggers net surge

To be honest, I think anyone that's half decent with coding could write a simelar product without much trouble. The full client is a bit more featured and has things like a calculator, proper news section that you can publish small articles to and a few more bits and pieces in a more fancy interface that looks more Vista-ish.

Yeah, the client really isn't much, Just runs in JAVA. Ads are pulled down at machine startup and displayed from a local cache, messages are pulled down in the same manner. All controlled through a very basic web interface. Mike.

I cannot dis-allow it on the grounds of the content - that is up to senior management to decide. The only grounds I could deny it on would be technical ones if it interfered or otherwise compromised our system. We extensively tested it and found it to be fine, so whether I personally like it or not it goes on the system. Same with any software or other decisions, unless there's a really good technical reason why it can't happen, then generally it does. Me not liking the idea doesn't really count. For those that don't know what it looks like, I've attached an image of it to this post. For some reason today we've had no ads displaying, but normally that bigger window would have a PSHE related message in it be it sex education, anti drugs message etc. with a click through to a relevant website e.g Talk to Frank. We can control the message at the bottom, and we can control the theme of the ads being displayed which is supposed to be linked to our weekly academy theme. Mike.

A knowledge base works wonders - anything I get asked more than a few times gets a knowledge base article. Then when someone else, or the same person reports the same problem, I e-mail them directing them to the knowledge base article and add "if you've any further questions please let me know" at the end of the message. Also, if they really do keep asking the same questions all the time, I would treat subsequent times after about the third as a lower priority than other calls, therefore making them wait just that bit longer for support. I think that's perfectally fair given the circumstances. I have done this in practise and it can work wonders as they suddenly reaslise you're not always immediately on hand to service their every need. Sometimes it's just plain old 'Fear of breaking it' that stops some users doing things on their own, but when left to their own devices for a bit, it's amazing how they can suddenty remember how to do it and usually get it right as well. Mike.

To be honest, I have no idea exacltly what they want to achieve with the system. However it's not cost us anything as Kent LEA are funding it for the first year. The main thing is the targeted advertising mainily promoting The kind of things covered in PSHE lessons, and it ticks a box somewhere to do with pushing these messages to students. All in all the program doesn't actually cause us any hassle except a noticeable slow down on some of our older machines. The ones which the full client locked up were Dell GX60 desktop machines which are celeron 2.4GHz with 1GB ram in. Our Dell D510 laptops also didn't like it very much when it was the full client. Mike.

We've had this live on our system now for several weeks - I managed to postpone installing it until the end of May. To be honest, apart from a few students who asked, I don't think anyone pays much attention to it. However it has affected our slower machines logon time - I've actually had students comment on this, so we're only running the basic client now which uses less resources. The full client caused the machines to lock up. Mike.

The head might not know, but it's not like the school as a whole doesn't. I wouldn't expect the head to know off the top of their head precisely how much we spend anyway, same as I wouldn't expect them to know how much we spend on premises etc. That's why schools employ business managers or bursers, because they're trusted to run the finances of the school. If they needed to know, they'd ask the right people for the information.

It's amazing how much better our Dell GX60's are with 19" TFT monitors instead of 17" CRT's - last year I was forever getting complaints about the speed of them, but this year hardly any!

I'm not familiar with Ruckus, apologies - didn't realise it had this functionality built in - our current wireless system is some what more antiquated. I've been told that that B-wireless system will pass authentication details up the line to a proxy, and it can be set to route all the traffic through the proxy so no settings to program in on the end user devices, but I've not actually seen it in action, only spoken to a technical advisor about it and read a bit. Edit: As I understand it, the device works as a gateway and DHCP server in its own V-LAN, so traffic is automatically routed to it once they connect. Once they authenticate to it, it acts as a proxy in its own right routing the traffic wherever you want, so you can point it at your filter and from there out to the internet as usual, or you could point it at an internal server for them to establish a remote desktop session through.