maniac

I'm still running older machines than that in parts of my school. We still have about 75 Dell GX60 machines which are 2.4 Celeron, but with a good well strealined build on them, they run very well. We also upped the RAM in all of them to 1GB from 512MB in August, this made a massive difference. We will probably keep them until they pack up completely, as they do what they need to and we have anther 20 in reserve to salvage for spares so they are zero cost to the school to keep. Maybe an option for you is to buy better machines for one room, and just upgrade the machines in the second room for the time being. - P4 processors and suitable RAM are relatively cheap to obtain second hand - RAM is stil affordable new. If it were me I'd rather have 1 great room and 1 older, rather than 2 middle of the road rooms, which is what you'll end up with if you buy within that budget - you'll really struggle to get decent reliable machines with only £150 to spend per machine in my opinion - £300 a machine and you'll get something reasonably good if you keep the existing monitors. Saying that, I've ordered a couple of machines privately from this company before, they seemed to be very good - it's probably this sort of company you will end up buying from, as I'm pretty sure you won't get anything new for that money that's going to be any good. refurbished and open box computer hardware Ex Demo | ITC Sales UK Store - Partner with Dell and HP A quick look through, and it seems for around £150 a unit you can get a low end duel core machine with 2GB ram in, however you only get a 90day warranty with them and their stock seems very low at the moment - they normally have some with 100+ machines available, but most of them at the moment seem to only have 1 or 2 units available. Mike.

I started as a 'network manager' for a middle school, but as it was only me I was network manager/technician rolled into one. I didn't do the entire job of a network manager really thou, as all the statigic decisions were made by senior management, I just did what I was asked. - I was also only on £13.5k for the role - although this was 6yrs ago now. Was there for almost exactly 2 years. Moved on to a technicians role at a large secondary, I was one of 2 technicians, then there was the senior tech and a network manager. The network manager left 6 months after I started there, and the senior tech was promoted to NM and I was promoted to senior technician effectively, but under the job title of 'ICT Development Engineer' Was here for 2 yrs 3 months roughly. I'm now a network manager for a small Academy school, which was quite a leap from what I was doing. Been here 18 months now and turned the whole ICT system round in that time. So about 4 yrs 3 months from my first job in ICT in schools, to being where I am now. I think that's pretty fast progression. The key is making sure you sell yourself well, and convincing someone that you're more than ready for that role. I had who knows how many interviews for different posts in other schools before I landed each of the above posts, persistance does pay off eventually. Mike.

Maybe there should be a minimum post count to be able to post a vacancy here, as it does say members may post vacancies that may be of interest, but there's no qualifying period of membership meaning someone could still sign up from a company and post a vacancy - even thou we know this breaks the rules, it would still consume moderators time to remove it. Minimum post count of say 10 posts before you could post in the vacancies forum would ensure it couldn't be posted in the first place. Generally it's members who have been on here a while that will want to advertise posts at their schools, or who find the links to of interest jobs, so I don't think this would harm this section of the forum at all. Just an idea. And yes, IanT, please continue to post the links you do, I actually find them very helpful just to keep track of the saleries different posts are offering at the moment and read through the job descriptions sometimes - it basically saves me trawling the net to find them myself. Mike.

If you've got some money to spend on getting this done, get terminal server and a seperate wireless SSID setup which can only see the terminal server and not the rest of your network, they can then connect into this to work on the schools software from. Virtually any device will connect into a terminal server, it's platform independant and is by far the best way of doing it in my opinion, but does cost a bit to get setup properly. Mike.

Any ideas? I've managed to encourage people to take copyright issues of having MP3 tracks on the network seriously, so now I'm faced with the question 'What can we use instead?' 'anything that's royalty free' 'Where can I get it from?' 'Errrr leave that with me for a bit . . .' Any good recources out there, or is it a case of scouring the web and creating our own library internally? Mike.

Microsoft Update KB947319 appears to cause issues with office, the update is for web components for office 2003, but as part of the installation it prompts for the origenal CD media. If installed via WSUS the CD seems to be prompted for when the program is next run. I've only just noticed this issue, even thou the update was issued in October last year it was only recently reported as a problem. It's taken me most of the week to narrow down what's been causing Excel to prompt for the installation media on some of my machines. This only seems to affect Excel and not other bits of office, but it's causing problems here as office was part of our origenal build and was not rolled out by MSI so, of course, the program can't find the installation files it needs and keeps prompting the students to insert CD. Has anyone else had this problem? Mike.

I have 2 reel to reel tape recorders at home that were salvaged from one of the schools I worked at a few years ago - I also had a very old Sony reel-to-reel video recorder which was a beast of a machine, although it eventually packed up and when I moved I gave it to a collector as I didn't have the space to keep it. Any idea why they're asking? Mike.

We've a few students in this school which have a genuine interest in learning more about the running of a network, and how it all works etc. which I'm pleasently surprised at. They actually ask intelligent questions, but sometimes I do wonder precisely how much I should embrace this and how much I should tell or show them about how the system works. I'd really like to develop their interest as they're all very bright students, but I do wonder where I should draw the line in what I show them, as I could well be creating problems for myself by giving them too much knowledge. Part of me says there's not much I could show them that they couldn't find out on the net anyway, but another part of me is saying steer clear and don't show them too much. Anyone else dealt with simelar students in their school, what did you do? Mike.

Best value for money does not always equal cheapest. Weigh up the other value added benefits of buying from a supplier that you already have strong links with. Sometimes we don't ever bother getting multiple quotes now as we have very strong links with our suppliers, and I know they push the boat out to give us excellent competitive pricing, even if it might not be the absolute rock bottom price, I'm also buying into the service they offer us knowing that if something does go wrong they will sort it out for us with minimal fuss and involvement from me - 1 phonecall and they do the rest. I'd buy the UK models at the slightly higher price and maintain a good working relationship with an existing supplier if it were me. mike.

I also worked out why it appeared to work on some machines - the ones I thought it was working on have the User Hive Cleanup Service on them as well which was doing its job, but there's some types of machine in the school that don't have this service on as it must have been missed in the build. I've rolled this out to the whole school now so it should ease the problems. Would be dead handy if FOG actually did remove traces of stale network accounts - I might have to suggest this as a development on their forum. Mike.

OK, some further reading would suggest I've miss understood this part of the fog service. It only deletes local accounts, and NOT the profiles left behind by network user accounts - damn! (If there was ever a case of RTFM I think this is it.) mike.

Just realised after 6 months that the user cleanup feature of FOG doesn't seem to work properly, but only on some machines. I've checked the correct settings are applied to it in fog, and the fog.log on the machine just mentions the protected accounts, but doesn't say anything else regarding user cleanup which is odd - normally when I've seen it working, it logs the users it deletes. This is now creating a problem, as I have hundreds of user profiles clogging up my machines If I use Delprof it runs and deletes them fine, but I was hoping FOG would handle this for me. Anyone got any ideas as to why it might not be working? Mike.

Use PsExec which will allow you to remotely execute that BAT file, which will restart the XIBO client. Mike.

Charging and storage are easy - every student has a secure locker with an 18v charging socket in - laptop can be stored and charged in these. There are many companies which make them. Because the chargers are low voltage, it avoids problems with PAT testing, and leads are available to fit pretty much all the main stream brands of laptop, PDA etc. (In fact I think the outputs are normally the cigarette lighter type plug allowing all manner of chargers to be used, although I've not got to this stage of my research yet) When we evetually go live with our new system to allow use ot student devices, which is in the pipeline, the access will be provided via a seperate network using a product such as http://www.itsltduk.co.uk/our_offerings/index.aspx?id=474 which can authenticate users against active directory and provide them with filtered controlled webaccess straight away - we would then offer a terminal server environment for students to connect to in order to use academy software. for students that don't have their own device, each departemnt will still have a pool of machines available to loan out if necessary.

I've ordered through Laptops and Spares before, they accept PO via fax an offer good pricing. They've sorted me out laptop screens for various machines and replacement batteries before. Mike

Cheers, saves me watching it. Saw the ones over christmas at my parents when I was staying there so wondered who it was.

Modern tape systems are a lot more robust than those of old - I had this debate with myself when looking at upgrading our backup system. I was going towards using a disk based system and hosting it in a remote building, but on speaking to the school insurers that solution is not satisfactory as they require a removeable backup to be taken offsite at least once a week. OK, so you can get removable disks, but in my opinion they are not robust enough to be transported regularly - drop it and you're probably knacker it. Drop a tape and it'll most likely be OK. After careful consideration we opted for an LTO4 tape loader to replaced our aging Sony AIT3 loader which is way to small in capacity for us now. We already have Symantec Backupexec so will continue using this until we upgrade it at some point in the future. Mike.

Should really start a new thread, but I'll answer your questions anyway as I'm a big fan of FOG. Yes. It's also rather good at a few other things as well. Very easy if you're already familiar with preparing images and using sysprep on them. Yes - it PXE network boots. Yes - it pulls the whole image down in minutes That's your stumbling block. You can use it to deploy your basic Windows XP image to your clients, but you still have the run the 'makeRM' workstation tool to complete the build. We used to do this on CC3 and it worked like a charm - much easier than doing the build the RM way from scratch, but it still took ages for the rest of the RM process to complete. Well it's an opensource product, so there's no harm in trying it - you won't break anything by having a go. The Fog Wiki is a great place to start, there's a very comprehensive user guide on there, but if you've already got it loaded and working then the hard part's done - the rest is working out the most effective way to use it in your school. With CC3 we used to use it to roll out a basic XP build with SP2 on, then let RM take over at this point. The image was set to automatically log in and run the makeCC3 program so all we had to do was fill in the boxes and away it went. You can't take an image of a fully built RM station, as if you change the name of a workstation once RM has it in it's grip, it messes up a lot of things - shame. On my new 'vanilla' network it does a lot for me; image distribution including automatically re-naming the workstation and adding it to AD, user tracking, shutting all my machines down at night, keeping screen resolutions in check and logging students off after 30mins of in-activity. It also has the ability to manage printers and do software distribution but I've never looked into these features as I have working processes n place for both. Mike.

How does that work thou unless the V-LAN you're in is confugured to be able to talk to all the others? I thought the idea of V-LANs was to segment the network so it couldn't talk directly to the other segments unless approperate routing is setup between them - or am I woefully wrong on this??

That problem is not unique to Lanschool - any of these sorts of products won't work across V-Lans properly (as far as I know) without some configuration to make it work. I think the key factor is the ports the product uses - if you are able to forward these so they are available between V-lans then it should work from any V-LAN to all the others. (I don't know much about V-Lans, but I sort of assume this can be done with some sort of routing?) Broadcast addresses are sometimes disabled on managed switches to stop DOS attacks using them. They would need to be turned on for this product to work properly, same as they would if you were using any other multicasting service. Without the use of the broadcast address, the program would have to scan every IP address individually instead of just sending out a multicast packet triggering the clients to register - which I believe is how it works. Certain other services like 'Show' probably wouldn't work properly without the use of the broadcast address. Again I think other simelar products would need the same. Unfortunitely we just run a 'flat' network here, no Vlans as not all our switches support them yet - so I can't actually help you get it working, only a few words of advice based on what I think I know about V-Lans.

Unless there's double yellows or another parking restriction there, I'm not sure there's anything you can do apart from ask her nicely not to (which I'll assume you've already done?) I suffer from the same sort of problem - my road is one way and very narrow with marked out parking bays and the rest double yellowed. I'm quite lucky as I have the end terrace with a narrow driveway along side it, and opposite it is double yellow lined. Problem is people always park on the double yellows - I know why they do as parking is very difficult in the area, but it does make it very hard to get on and off my driveway properly.

I WISH they'd hammer that one home to the kids in this school. The amount of work which is copied and pasted directly from Wikipaedia pages scares me, the fact teachers don't clock it either, and the fact some students cite wikipaedia as a factual source! I'd love to block it, and force them to look at the websites containing the factual information, but no chance!

Examine the IAS server logfiles and see what it's logged - it will give you a good clue as to where the problem is. Can't remember the directory it saves them in, but it's a text based log file and not in event viewer. Mike.

2 Groups - SIMS users and SIMS admins SIMS admins have modify rights to the whole sims drive. SIMS users have read only rights to the SIMS directory and sub Directories only. Works for us. On the local machines simsperm.bat is run to set SIMS users to modify rights. Mike.

Long shot, but they obviously got the documents from somewhere in the first place, is it possible they brought them from you in the first place, and thus if you looked at your sales for the last few months, there could be one or two that stand out as unusual (be they the country they are from or something like that) that might give you a lead of some sort?? Of course there's every possibility they were obtained illigally in the first place, in which case you'll not have any hope of tracking them that way, but just a thought. Suppose it depends on the sorts of documents you're talking about and how popular and easy to get hold of they are anyway, and what sort of volume of sale's you're talking as well. - could at least be worth a look. Mike.