maniac

Unshielded is fine.

rather than re-boot the switch, is there a command which will turn the PoE off and back on again thus cycling the power at the device? Saves losing connection to the rest of the devices connected, some of which might complain about the disconection.

Wow, sussex to Australia in 1hr 27mins, what airline you flying?

Very good

No worries, there's a little thanks button at the bottom of my post, feel free to press it Mike.

Check you're using the FQDN when specifying the domain for FOG to join clients to, e.g 'school.local' and not just 'school'. Also make sure you haven't accidently typed a space at the end of the domain name in FOG, this caused an issue for me when I first set it up. Mike.

I would order the one I linked you to - I order all my cabling bits from them as they are pretty much the best value place I've found. Cat5e will be fine for a photocopier. Mike.

Here's the VB project folder for the Damage Reporter program. It's only about 10 lines of code, and please don't shoot me down for it not following any sort of programming guidelines as I know it probably doesn't, but it works - that's all I was interested in. Also excuse the fact it's called 'system information' as the origenal project was to serve a different purpose, but ended up as this when I suddenly had the idea. Open it in Visual Basic 2008 Express edition - you should be able to see which bits you need to edit to customise it for your setup. Needless to say it requires the .NET framework to run. Mike. Damage Reporter.zip

Problem is it's hard coded to my system and is written in VB.NET. I'll zip up and post the project files if you like? Mike.

Check the event viewer for around the time it stops working, and see what it reports!

Blimy, I could list loads as my enitre system consists of VBS scripts or reg hacks that I've written. My most useful is a bit of programming is the bit that allows students to see how much disk space they are using and how much their quota is when you use Server 2003 disk management to manage disk quotas. Normally with the server 2003 quota system the first the student knows they are running out of space is when the system e-mails them telling them they're at 80% - with this they can check instantly and see how much they are using. A script which disables the physical network cards on my student laptops so FOG registers the logon/logoffs properly on the wireless. My little program that the students use to report a damaged machine, they just double click the icon and it asks if they are sure they want to report this machine as damaged, Y/N - click yes and it e-mails us telling us the machine and username. So far has proved relatively OK, very few false reports and it's more efficient that the staff telling us about damage as they never do! Also written a custom password reset tool which is on this website somewhere. I've never really finished it thou so it's a work in progress, although it is used daily by the IT staff in my school. Mike.

You can just plug it into the switch if you want to - it's not the most professional way of doing it, but it will work. All you need for the cable is some of this Category 5E UTP Cable Grey 305m by Excel - Computer Room Installations - The Networking Store Then some of these Pack of 100 x Amp Cat5e RJ45 Connectors - Solid UTP Cable by AMP - Computer Room Installations - and an suitable crimping tool (about £30) and you can make the cable as long as you need it to be and crimp the plugs on the end. If it's not too long a distance, buy a premade up patch lead like this - this one is 20 metres. Cat5e RJ45 Patch Lead Unbooted 20m - Computer Room Installations - The Networking Store and just bung that in. However if you want to do it properly, it should really terminate at the patch panel and have a wall outlet fitted which is actually easter and cheaper to do than you think it might be - all you need is a punchdown tool to make the connections with, which is actually a lot easier than crimping RJ45's onto the ends. Mike.

Building a domain controller is actually not that time consuming. For a start you've got a high spec machine so the install is nice and quick. Run windows updates to get it all up to date, then run DCPROMO and follow through the steps - it does it all for you. You'll probably also need to install DNS services and configure them if you're not running DNS somewhere else already. It actually doesn't take longer than a couple of hours to establish your domain, it's all the fiddly bits like Group polciy configurations that take the time. Migrating across SIMS can be tricky. Our SIMS support migrated us across to our new SIMS server in about 3 hours, although of course they've done it many times before - I wasn't going anywhere near it, as me and SIMS don't get on. To get ahead of yourself you could do what I did which is to setup a working example of the new domain on a virtual server, and also setup a windows XP machine as another virtual machine so you can create and test the group policies in this environment, then you can back them up from the virtual server and restore them to the active environment in a few minutes. Mike.

We've been using them here for years, two little white boxes on the walls of the exam hall that pick up the signal type used by a mobile phone and then announce very loudly in an irritating voice that a mobile phone has been detected in the room. Obviously they can be switched off when the room's not being used for an exam. The only problem is if someone walks past the hall with a mobile it can trigger them, but it's supposed to be out of bounds when there's an exam on anyway. Mike.

4-5 hours for a full build What are you using to image the machines with, as I can copy down a 5GB image to a workstation using FOG in about 5 minutes flat depending on the machine. Mike.

I'll have to try ours again sometimes. Off the top of my head I think it sends a ~ before each code, but I can't remember precisely as it was a while back when I programmed our new one.

I did pretty much all of the above single handedly in roughly a week, this included physically getting them into the rack and a majority of the testing although of course this went on for the subsequent weeks as we discovered new security flaws or tested bits of the system properly. No offence, but a with a decent imaging system and you should be able to do a lot more than 20 a day. We imaged all 600 of our machines in about 7-8 days here last summer and a majority of them are laptops, so that includes getting them out, cleaning them, fixing them, imaging them, labelling them and putting them away - there were 3 of us doing this however. The server side of things, providing you are un-interrupted and know exactly what you need to do and the order you need to do it in should take no longer than a week I wouldn't have thought, but it all depends how much data there is and whether you run into problems along the way, so I would allow 6-7 full days for this. Client PC's it may take 1 day to build your perfect image and test it, then maybe a further 2-3 days to image the PCs you have, but that depends on how many different types of PCs you've got around the building and how you image them. If you're building them all from CD's it's going to take a lot longer, if you're using an imaging system like FOG, then it's obviously a lot quicker. If I were doing it, I would allow 2 full weeks minimum, plus a further week when the system will be useable, but you might be ironing out the bugs still. Mike.

Off the top of my head I can't remember the characters it sends, but all it needs to be setup to do is send a control character before every barcode and I believe a CR at the end. Anyone who's got a scanner setup and working for eclipse, just scan something with it into notepad and you'll see what characters it sends. Any barcode scanner can be setup to work quite easily, normally using the control code book which comes with it - I did our new one in about 2 minutes once I knew the characters it sent. Mike.

We run Papercut for our print management. We issue credits on a termly basis and I've spent a long time setting up all the rules to take advantage of its features. Students get 100 credits Staff get 200 credits for personal use Departments get 1000 credits, apart from enterprise who get 2000 as they are a heavy IT based subject. Printing costs the following: A4 mono page = 1 credit A4 colour page = 2 credits A3 colour page = 5 credits When a staff member prints they can chose whether to charge their department budget or personal budget. Admin and senior teachers aren't credited, although their printing is still logged. We have a restriction of 3 copies per document, any more than that and we expect staff to use the photocpying facilities. We also have a restriction of printing the same document within 60 seconds, mainly put in pace to stop people bypassing the 3 copies rule, although seriously some teachers will sit there and religeously print the same document 3 times every 60 seconds until they've got the number of copies they want - it would have been quicker to have walked to the photocopier. Needless to say when these teachers ask for more credit, we make it clear that we can see they've been bypassing the rules and they only get a small amount extra. Anything called Document* is rejected to encourage students to save their work before printing. As an additional rule, student printing has to be approved by a member of staff to most printers. When they print their documents, it goes into a queue and won't print until a member of staff clicks allow in the print management interface. We introduced this after the first few weeks when students were using up their credits within a few days printing rubbish out to the printers, so we had to give staff more control over what was being printed. Some staff like this, others see it as an inconvenience, but it works quite well overall. Papercut is, in my opinion, the best value and possibly one of the most reliable print management products out there. Mike.

£176 for a search for both of you isn't as bad as I've been charged in the past - it has cost me £120 per person in the house before. Month and a halfs rent as deposit isn't that unusual either. I've never been charged a chekin fee before, sounds like they like to print money this letting agents. With your contents insurance, £90 sounds very cheap - check that's not £90 a month or a short policy like 3 or 6 months. If it's any of those things I'd shop around and get your own insurance from somewhere. I almost signed into my old letting agents own insurance until I realised it was only a 6 month policy which made it very expensive in comparison to what I could get elsewhere. Mike.

If you're even considering getting Sky, look at their bundle as you can get all of their services for about £35 which works out cheaper than buying a phoneline, broadband and sky seperately. They have an unlimited download option on their broadband. I've got their package, and so far it's been very good except for a problem with the line, but that wasn't skys fault. If you're not bothered about Sky TV, then O2 or Be Unlimited are probably your best bets. Mike.

Software restriction policies will be useless for this, as they are not an executable but a document. You can use Server 2003 to restrict that extension being stored in their home areas, but if they bring them in on memorysticks there's not a lot that can be done technically to combat it - it then becomes a classroom control issue for the staff to ensure students are all on task and not doing things they shouldn't. Because playing games isn't actually doing any harm to the system, there's only so much time I'll spend trying to find ways to block them - the rest is down to the teaching staff. Mike.

Buy any top of the range DSLR camera and it will use CF because the access speed is far superior to SD cards or any other card storage format. Sometimes they'll have SD cards as well, but it takes a lot longer to save an image to these - CF is far from a dead format. Our cashless catering loaders run their OS from CF cards.

I'd use linux as the back end, dead easy install in linux and less problems with uploading larger content to it - I had major issues on Windows getting the upload functions to work properly. The clients can be Windows XP, they are only looking at the server for content and it works no matter what OS the server is running, which is why I say go Linux for the server if you can. I have one gripe with Xibo, and that is it needs quite a powerful machine to run the client properly - any more than 2 moving areas of the screen and it grinds to a hault on some of my lower specification clients. The best bit however is being able to embed powerpoints - that way departments prepare their content for me in powerpoint, and I just tweek the powerpoint so it runs in a loop and upload it - simples! Mike.

Our music teacher uses that one on his IWB very effectively.