maniac

I won't suggest that, as last time I aired my views on such issues, I think I was told to "leave the running of the school to the management team and concentrate on my job" Therefore I now only do as asked. They want to be able to do this, and thus I shall provide a way of doing it - what's actually published within it is not my responsibility.

It's 400 students once a week and is only on a subscription basis - generally you only get flagged as a spam sender if you're sending 1000's and if people report your address as spam. We don't really want to pay for a service we can do with the equipment we already have available - we have an exchange server so I'm going to look at the script posted above, as that seems to fit the bill.

Other issue here is the website is difficult to update, and requires me to do it. The idea of this is it can be done with no involvement from us as we have enough to do as it is!

***Yawn*** Is this thread still rumbling on, surely people have more important things to worry about. This is a web forum, it forms a tiny little piece of my life as it probably does for most of you - I can't understand what the big issue is people!

Can't really do that, as the bulletin often names specific students for achievements, and details things which we only really want parents to know about and not anyone and everyone. We don't have parent/carer logins for our VLE yet as I'vbe not had time to get that side of the system working, and we don't have a parent gateway for sims yet either so we can't distribute it this way. Anyhow, to encourage people to read it we'd like it to be as acccessible as possible. PDF attachment to an e-mail is how we'd like to do it. Mike.

Does anyone have any recomendations for a piece of software we could use to e-mail parents en-mass with an attachment? This is so we can e-mail out our weekly bulletin to parents who have subscribed to it. I know we could use BCC field in outlook, but I'd like to find a way of customising the e-mail so it's a bit more personal. Word allows you to mail merge to e-mail addresses, but won't allow you to put an attachment on. I've found a really clunky way of doing it with a Macro in word, but it needs to be easy to use if possible so a member of admin staff could set the process going with minimal fuss. Any recomendations? Mike.

Oooowwwww, poor thing. 3 years is pretty good for a Gerbil thou. Strange how you get so attached to such a small creature - I had gerbils for many years when I lived at home.

My head unit takes SD cards, but only reads up to 2GB ones which is a shame. Also has a 3.5mm jack on the front, but I've never used it. It doesn't have a CD player! Mike.

I would not join your new servers to the existing RM domain, as they will then inherit all the RM GPO's and security settings including any faults that may lie in that structure. I would create a brand new domain with a different name, and for the purposes of migrating your users and home areas etc. create a two way trust between them while both domains co-exist - that's my recomendation anyhow.

15 year old cavalier costs me the grand total of £220 a year to insure fully comp, and that's with protecting my no claims as well - if I didn't do that, it'd be about £190 a year - bargain! Mike.

See here. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/7041-stopping-exe-files-being-run-usb-stick.html#post101492

I have a logitech wireless laser mouse on my desk, not sure of the model mind. We brought a load of them a while back for all the admin team. Runs on a single AA battery for ages, and is pretty good. Personally I would go old skool and have one of these: http://www.blogiseverything.com/images/old_ibm_mouse.jpg For those that don't know, it's an origenal IBM PS/2 mouse, the very systems that gave those little keyboard and mouse plugs their name. I used to have one of these until the cable broke on it - 12 years that mouse served me, the don't make 'em like that anymore! Mike.

Dunno whether to laugh of cry. Were they joking or were they serious thou, that is the question?

Oh boy do I know how you feel. We're quite a small school with regards to staff and students, but we have more Devices than a lot of larger schools I know of - over 600 end user devices and 11 servers. I had a team of two techs and myself as network manager until October, when one of my Techs left. It's now just me and my one remaining tech, and I am effectively now a glorified technician as in order to keep up it's necessary to do this. This means that virtually any documentation or admin tasks have gone out the window since October e.g I recently got asked for an up-to-date asset register, but that's not been updated since the 2nd tech left. I'm supposed to be responsible for the website and the Learning platform, which I enjoy doing, but never get the time to devote to them and a million and one other things. At the end of the day thou you can't perform miracles, you make a choise either way - either the end users suffer a little so you get the time to do the jobs you need to do, or the admin and documentation suffer in order to please end users, but it's virtually impossible to do both in the position you're in. I try my best not to get too stressed as there's only so much you can do, and I find regular E-mails to senior management to make them aware of your workload are quite effective, and refering any complaints you get regarding quality of service to senior management works as well. As long as you're doing you best, you can't do more than that! Mike.

Also one of our biggest hassles was staff laptops - we had to collect them all in at the end of the term, and store them for re-imaging/moving to the new domain. The logistics of this are bigger than you anticipate, and you need a well worked out plan for re-distributing them back to staff and getting them all happily logged onto the new system. I had a 1 hour slot on the first staff training day of the new term to introduce all the staff to the new system, and give them a guided tour around what was different when compared to the old one. I also wrote a user guide to go with this - this also takes time which I hadn't really allocated so had to do a lot of extra work from home to prepare this. It's probably the single biggest achevement of my career to date migrating from CC3, and one I'm quite proud of as it is by no means a trivial undertaking. Suceed and the benefits are huge, but get it wrong and the headaches it will cause you are immense. Remember there's no support providor to pick up the phone and call when things go wrong if you go it alone, so make sure you have a very good understanding of what you're taking on - the buck stops with you once you're on a vanilla system. (Unless of course you pay a 3rd party for additional support) Mike.

I've not personally migrated from CC3 to server 2008, but I have migrated from CC3 to Server 2003 based network (mainly because we already had the licenses) I used Robocopy to move the students, staff and shared areas from the old to the new You can run two domains in the same IP address range, I created our new domain and ran it alongside our old one for a few weeks while I got it all working. I also created a trust between the two domains, which makes life a lot easier. To start with the old and new domains ran their own DNS, but DHCP must only be on one server on your network at a time - it was the last service to move over. We temporarily added our new DNS servers into the DHCP settings for the old network so the two would function in parallel, then turned DHCP off on the old and on on the new as our final step before retiring the old domain. If you're part of a broad band consortium, they will probaby specify what IP address range your school should be using to avoid conflicts on their network. If you have your own firewall and NAT in place, this might not matter and you would be free to pick any private IP address range you want. Subnets will depend on the number of IP addresses you need to use - we have a block of 4 **.**.60.1 - **.**.63.254 which needs a subnet of 255.255.252.0 to make them all talk to each other. The trick is to get the new domain fully functioning before moving anything across, then you can do one of 2 things. Move users across one at a time by adding their workstations to the new domain, moving across their work then allowing them to logon to the new domain. Or do what we did which was to have a week where no one could use the system, so we could move everything across in one go, then slowly add users and workstations to the new network one at a time, and of course re-image all our student machines after this - this took most of the summer to complete. We were lucky in a way as our staff machines wern't RM'd so to speak, so we could simply add them to the new domain as they were, but for workstations which have been through the RM build process, you have no choice but to re-image. We adopted FOG as our imaging solution, as of course one of the things you lose is the RM build process. We adopted papercut to replace RM print management, and a series of VB scripts to do printer and drive mapping. There's a lot involved in the process, and a well layed out plan is essential. I planned our move for 4 months before we did it, and had a very well written plan which worked pretty flawlessely, although took longer than anticipated; so one big tip is allow much more time than you think you're going to need. Even with 2 weeks extra on my schedule, we struggled to complete in time for September - lots of late nights when we were getting close to the end of the holiday, but boy are we glad we did it. Mike.

I have this in my garage, http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/MK1%20Golf/b4901b4d.jpg Sadly not on the road at the moment as the clutch went 2 years ago and I've just never had the money to put her back on the road. On top of that she also needs a fair number of other jobs doing. However, as my current daily driver is on the way out as well, I may well get her fixed soon and use as my daily drive for the summer months Mike

Hmm, looks familar. Students Staff Amazingly 100 staff use more space than 450 students. Executable files is worrying, File Server Recource manager is supposed to stop these being saved. Mike.

Not necessarily, you can create CTF files for transfering data around other than when the student leaves or joins the school. I seem to recall a couple of applications which use the CTF file as their prefered import method, Exam board software and the like. It's been a while since I used Sercos product, but I expect somewhere in there wil be a CTF export option which will not need a leaving date. Mike.

I know there's plenty of places you can get these, does anyone have a specific recomendation for a company to order them from. I need approximately 2000 of them sequentially numbered and if possible with the school name and logo on as well - depending on cost. Mike.

To be honest, it was so long ago when I set this up I can't remember precisely all the steps - IAS and RADIUS is quite complex to get working, I seem to remember it took a lot of fiddling. Effectively it's the policy conditions in IAS you can change to allow authentication only if certain conditions are met. I created a group and called it 'Allow wireles connection' which I added all our wireless devices to - I then set the policy conditions to state 'NAS-Port-Type matches "Wireless - other OR Wireless - IEE 802.11" AND Windows-Groups matches "Allow Wireless Connection" - this ensures only devices that meet those two conditions are authenticated. I also changed our wireless group policy so it is set for Computer Only authentication - there's a box in there somewhere to do this. It did take me a little while to get this working properly, but now it is we have very few wireless problems in this school, and our access points are pretty old Cisco 1200 series ones. Incidently my wireless system doesn't even prompt for a username and password if un-authorised people try and connect to it now, it just sits there saying 'authenticating' then fails. Mike.

Afraid this method will restrict the students to receive only from the users you specify in the group. You can do it the other way round, and block them receiveing only from a certain group instead of the 'only from' option, but my script would need some modifying to achieve that as you'd need to change the option button to 'From everyone except' which can be done, but I don't know the database value to do it as for my purpose what I've written does what is needed at my school. If I've got time I'll see if I can modify it and produce two versions. Mike.

Just use machine only authentication instead of user authentication, you don't even need certificates. Our RADIUS secured wireless system only lets devices with an authorised account in AD connect, user authentication is disabled. If you're using IAS as your authentication server it's a doddle. It also stops the issues you sometimes get when the machine changes from machine based to user based authentication at login when setup using the IAS defaults. IF you're using another RADIUS server however, I'm not sure if you can do it. IAS is the most popular if you don't have a managed system like Cisco with it's own RADIUS server built in. Mike.

The lapbank trollys we have simply have 4 8 way leads in the side of them, with each one having a seperate plug, so you do need 4 plugs per trolly, although we've found you can get away with plugging these into a 4 way lead and it doesn't fuse. The issue is not the amount of power they draw, the reason most people get problems with circuits tripping out is because of earth leakage from the adapters, particularly when they are first powered on. The latest HSE guidelines recommend plugs conforming to IEC 60309, otherwise known as commando plugs for laptop trollies, but this is often impractical. Mike.

I've written a VB startup script which copies the client application onto the local workstations if it doesn't already exist. It runs a lot quicker when launched locally, particularly over wireless. For running it, it's simply added to the startup group for 'all users' again done by script. Works like a charm here for all students and staff. Ocassionally it doesn't run at startup for whatever reason. To overcome this, there's also an icon copied to the desktop to allow users to launch the program manually. Mike.