maniac

I was looking at this product. BWireless, Wi-Fi hotspot solution, managing a system of hotspots, ideal for schools, colleges and universities, wireless internet access Which will authenticate against Active directory via a web form, simelar to the way BT-Openzone works. This means you won't need to give out encrypton keys etc, but can still keep your wireless system safe from outside users using it. From here, you can allow them access to whatever you see fit as the whole system works within its own V-Lan. My idea was to have them having internet access only - I've been told you can route the whole lot through a proxy so no need for individual proxy settings, and then serve students remote desktops via a web based interface - no direct connections to server to stop the virus risk. As I understand it devices connected via this system cannot see each other either, they can only get out to whatever service you specify. Seems the ideal solution to me. Unfortunitely budget contraints have stoped the purchase of this in the school I work in, but I did a fair bit of research into how it worked. Mike.

We use Its learning here and I've found it to be pretty good now they've ironed out all the bugs with their lynchpin system which links SIMS to it. It also has built into it a parent portal which will eventually have the ability to display various data from SIMS to parents (this is in development) and as far as I know this is no extra charge as parent accounts are free on Its learning. They are always developing new features into the platform as well, which is encouraging. So far my experiences have been fairly positive. Must admit, we don't actually use it much at the moment, but that's going to change from September when we issue parent/carer logins for it and policies are changing to insist on the use of the learning platform for certain things within the school. Mike

I haven't been here as much, but that's mainly because I'm busy planning summer projects and a million and one other things.

A key to the secure laptop cabinets we have, with a nice big keyring labelling it. Various laptop parts, mainly keys from keyboards. I think if I looked in all the rooms I could probably make at least one complete keyboard.

We have a fully functional TV aerial on the roof with freeview box connected to the projector in the main hall, so that's how we're going to show it here. I'm also capturing that output and streaming it over the network using VLC media player - should work a treat, although the lag is a few seconds on the streaming side. Mike.

I use powerpoint for photo displays, BUT when you save the presentation make sure you turn image compression ON and it doesn't crash when it tries to load big images. I've always found the powerpoint playing abilities of Xibo to be very reliable and by far the most useful feature, as I just get people to submit their content in powerpoint format to me now - job done! Mike.

I find if the RSS feed doesn't load correctly when xibo starts up, it just sits there with 'loading' on the screen. I fould putting the xibo client through our proxy helped, even thou it can access the feeds without needing it.

Turned my heating off at the beginning of May! I have the opposite problem - damn radiators upstairs get hot even thou the heating is off because the silly installers sometime in the 70's put a 22mm flow pipe but only a 15mm return pipe in, thus my hot water heating loop over flows into the Central heating header tank. People get really confused with heating and hotwater systems, but they are actually quite straight forward in most circumstances if you have a fairly traditional setup - it's basically 2 big loops with a header tank at the top - 1 for your hot water and one for your central heating. The most likely cadidate is the 3 port (or mid point) valve which will sit somewhere on the flow pipe from the boiler - this is responsible for directing the flow of water to your hotwater tank loop, central heating loop or both as dictated by the timer. You can easily see where the water's flowing by feeling the pipes (carefully - some of them will be very hot.) First make sure the system's running with only CH selected - it should only be diverting water to the CH pipes and none to the HW, if it is sending water elsehwere then you have a faulty 3 port value - this is what I would check first. You can then do the same in HW only mode and then select both. There's also normally an indicator on the side of the valve to show what it's doing - if you get someone to switch between HW and CH while you watch the valve you should see it move. They are surprisngly easy to change yourself, and the part is only about £50. I had to do this when I first moved into my house as mine was stuck on CH only mode and wouldn't heat the Hot water. Mike.

The only way to change this is a registry change - I have a startup script which runs once as an 'initial startup script' the way it only runs once is by writing a little marker flag to the hard drive of the machine which is the first thing the script looks for, if it's there then the whole thing is bypassed, if it's not then it runs and completes a whole host of changes then automatically re-boots the machine. This script does all manner of things for me, changeing that box is one of them - it also sets my startup wallpaper, screen saver, copies across some files and applies a selection of other changes that makes my imaging process pratically automated. Mike.

I'm boring here, and have a systematic labelling system e.g SA-DC01 = Spires Academy Domain Controller 01 etc. etc.

Documen....what?? It'd be nice to have the time, but our new network is 100% un-documented at the moment as I just do not have the time to do it - it would take weeks to do properly. What you should have is a nice guide broken down system by system, explaining how each bit works. e.g the contents page I wrote for our documentation had the following sections - this was the first draft, I'm aware there are bits missing, and overlapping sections - it would have been fine tuned if I had the time. I only got as far as writing the first section.

The more important question is now BECTA will cease to exist, maybe it's edugeeks time to shine as an independant source of good advice on schools ICT? Of course it could never become another BECTA, but there's certainly areas which it could become an authorative source - particularly if it was possible to license some of the material on the BECTA website, all the masses of documentation some of which is actually very useful? just thinking out loud. Will the BECTA website remain as an archive does anyone know - be a shame to lose it all. Mike.

I was just thinking the same, as we have an HP8550 and a Xerox 4500 printer, both have HDD's in. Might take them out sometime and see what they might be storing.

I would recommend using roaming profiles for Staff, purely so it stores things like favourites and various program settings for staff. When logged on off-line, it will use the cached version of the profile, when logged on in school it will merge the network version and local version so changes made offline are updated to the network. If you wanted to use a mandatory profile however, you can quite easily re-direct the profile path to a locally stored mandatory profile by doing what your described above. I tested this out with our student machines, but found the time it saved loading it locally as oppose to from the network was quite small, so we opted to keep ours networked so making changes to it was easier. Mike.

osTube Community Edition Should do the job. Was going to set that up in my school, but just never had the time. Mike

I want to do something so rediculously simple, I can't believe I can't work it out. We have two phones in this office, one was only added recently so I have my own extension. All I want to do is create a group so that when someone rings the support line, it rings both phones in the office and not just the one, but if someone rings my extension directly it only rings my phone. I'm pretty sure this can be done, but I can't figure it out on this switchboard. The phone system is a Panasonic Digital Super Hybred system with a KX-T7431 handset - not sure on the switchboard model number, it has about 45 extensions thou. Can anyone help? Mike.

Blimy, only 5 years old and it failed on that, quite unusual. Corrosion on parts like that which is bad enough for the car to fail takes quite a bit to happen, normally only if the cars been parked up outside for a long time. They don't make 'em like they used to, my car is 15 years old with 104,000 miles on the clock, and it flew through the last 2 MOT's with no problems at all - I seriously doubt it's going to obtain a 3rd one however.

While this thread is here, can I add a massive thanks to Dan as well for being able to supply me with the printer I was after, when my normal supplier let me down big time. Seriously, within 24hrs I had the thing sitting thre in front of me. Now that's service for you! Needless to say we shall be using you again when we need items in the future. +Rep has been given. Mike.

We used to get that here, but since the students have realised we have a very good backup system that works, as well as Shadow Copies running twice a day word's got round and they don't tend to try it now.

Yes, that's the one, if you can get me one I'd be most grateful.

for security, you won't beat these 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. We have 14 of them, and they're brilliant!

(Apologies for posting this in general chat, for some reason I can't get the forum 'Our advertisers' to display, or any of the threads in it - they just come up blank for some reason.) I'm desperately after a Canon Pixma Pro 9000 photo inkjet printer, as our normal supplier has made a mistake and suddenly realised they can't supply it, and we really need it ASAP. There appears to be an issue surrounding stock of this item at the moment, as he can't source one from anywhere. What I'm hoping is one of the Edugeek sponsors may just have one of these in stock and be able to ship it to me tomorrow? Can anyone help? Mike.

Well over 10k last year, I don't have an exact figure as finances got in a right old mess towards the end of last year. This year (Since September) however, I've only placed 2 toner orders costing about £2000 a time - that's because we introduced print management and the costs have come right down - result! Mike.

We use papercut here. We're quite strict because the amount of waste when I first started here was appauling. Students get 100 prin credtis per term, staff get 200, departments get a base of 1000 with a couple of departments getting 1500 this is allocated on a termly basis. When staff print they can charge their personal budget, or their department budget depending on what they're printing. Print jobs aren't done by cost, we found this confused people thinking their budgets were being directly charged for printing costs. Insted it's done simply by credits. 1 credit per B/W page, 2 per colour page. There's a copy limit of 3 printouts, a rule to stop work beng printed without being saved, a rule which stops the same print job being printed withinn 60 seconds. For students we also have a release queue system which staff control so they can monitor what's printed in their room. After some initial uproar when this was introduced, it has settled down and staff have generally accepted the system, bar one of two. It also has the full support of senior management because of the amout of money it has saved the school so far this year. Handing out more credits is treated on a case by case basis, we only get a few of these torwards the end of the term normally. Mike.

I tend to not label the media with days or months etc, just the cases they are in. My tapes are just labelled 001, 002, 003 etc. Backupexec is automatically set to export the last tape used to the tapeloaders loading bay, so all I have to do in the morning is eject it, put it in the right case in the safe, and insert the next tape which is automatically imported into the right slot just before the backup is set to start - It's as fully automated as you can get. If the backup job spans 2 or more tapes, then things get a bit more complecated - the only job I have which does this is my end of month backup, which includes backing up our machine images etc. The best thing about the tape changer is if left for a few days un-attended without the tapes being swapped, you will still get all the necessary backups as it will just chose the next available blank tape until they've all been used. However you won't get this benefit if you allocate specific backup jobs to specific media, as backupexec will try and find the media, relise it isn't there and not complete the backup, unless you've had the foresight to put all the relevant tapes in the tape changer in the first place, but sometimes you just don't have the chance to do this - best to leave it to chose the first available media in my opinion. Mike.