maniac

It's simple, we don't allow the use of the chargers in school. The staff/students are issued their ipad with charger, but they charge the devices at home and there is no provision for device charging in school other than hooking their Ipad up to the USB port on the PC should they wish. If you do PAT test them, then a visual inspection should be sufficient on that sort of thing, they are sealed units and double insulated so unless there is serious physical damage to the unit, the risk of electric shock from them is pretty much nil. However, that visual inspection should still be logged and the device should still be stickerd in the same way as everything else, to prove it has been inspected. PAT testing is a right pain in the backside, we all know it is and we all hate the inconvenience of it, however it is a necessary evil that really should be done regularly and properly. Mike.

Hello all, Long time no post from me, been quite busy lately settling back into my old job, long story. Anyhow, I'm in the middle of an Office 365 deployment here, we've got the product chiefly to take advantage of the Mobile Apps on iPads for staff for whom we brought the A3 package, and the ability for students and staff to have a cloud storage area that we have some sort of control over. I've got all the basics in place, the ADFS for SSO and DirSync is all working really well so I've got to the stage of actually configuring the product. We're not using the e-mail side of the system yet, although I am planning of getting a hybrid mail setup working at some point so we can migrate people onto office 365 at will if we choose to, anyhow that's a different matter. Obviously one of the most powerful features of office 365 is the inclusion of Sharepoint in the product, but in playing with it there seems a lot of different potential ways of configuring it to work. Have any schools got a template or can give me an idea of how they have configured sharepoint to work in their organisation and how well it's worked? Essentially I've two different options available to me at the moment as far as I can see. Firstly is to just have two sites, one for students and one for staff and use directories within the document library in each to give each faculty an area to deposit shared resources for both staff and students - essentially a virtualisation of our current P:\ - not terribly efficient use of the service, but quick and easy to implement and the structure and organisation is familiar to staff. The actual pages on the sharepoint site would be nothing more than a simple introduction and instructions on accessing the shared resources. The second thought is to have a 'mini site' for each faculty that I will template in a certain way, then leave them to organise as they wish, delegating the appropriate rights. This comes with more support overheads of course and training needs as it's a new concept for pretty much all the staff, but does mean each faculty will be more in control of their own presence in the system. The main site would simply act as an index of these mini sites together with general information that's needed for all. OR . . . . I don't know, any other suggestions?? Sharepoint is a new product to me, so I'm not fully aware of how it all works yet, but I can see the potential. Cheers for your help all! Mike. :-)

You would like to think so, yes and that's my arguement too. The tills however are about 5 years old now, however the spec is good enough to run windows 7 with an increase in RAM, it's not doing anything terribly complex afterall. I have a meeting coming up with the supplier to discuss this and other issues surrounding their product now they know we are investigating changing, so we'll see what they have to say.

I'm not naming and shaming in public, I'll PM you.

Hello all! We have an existing cashless catering solution here, but to cut a long story short they want a silly amount of money to 'upgrade' the system to work on windows 7 and on top of a very expensive support contract and questionable reliability we think it might be time to tender for a replacement system. As part of this we're also thinking of moving away from biometrics which has never worked properly for us (and in my opinion cases more problems than it solves) and going for proximity cards instead - pros and cons of this? So any recomendations on good cashless solutions to look at? I'm aware nationwide retail and cunninghams, any others that are worth approaching? Cheers! Mike.

Students using iMovie (I think that's what they're using) on our networked macs seem to be filling up their home folders with large amounts of big files with seemingly random extensions, see attached picture. Are these some sort of temporary file and can they be deleted does anyone know? I'm pretty sure they are as they are hidden, but as I'm unsure how this program works I don't just want to do this incase it's some vital working files or something. Any help appreciated, Regards, Mike.

Hello all, As part of a network overhaul I am doing at the moment, we'd quite like to implement guest/visitor wireless access provision with time expired/single use usernames and passwords which can be issued by our receptionist. We have the Zyxel solution at one of our other sites with the little receipt printer on reception and it works brilliantly, but it is a tad pricey especially for the site I'm currently looking for a solution for which has 3 potential points of needing to issue guest access, hence requiring 3 printers. I've had an idea that we can implement something ourselves for a lot less than the Zyxel solution which does a similar job. The idea is to utilise the Meru system we have that has a captive portal system built in which you can authenticate against a radius server from. I need to find or try and create a product which allows the receptionist to simply click a button on their computer to generate a time limited or single use username and password on a radius server of some description, and to dump this output to a receipt printer to give to the visitor (Receipt printers can be obtained for about £45 on E-bay) I know there are products such as free radius to provide the authentication mechanism, but what I'm lacking is the means for unique usernames and passwords to be easily created and handed out by the receptionist(s) Anyone got any ideas how I can possibly achieve this? Free radius uses mySQL as a database, so is it as simple as creating a PHP script that adds an appropriate record to the database and a cron job to expire them, or is there more to it than this? (I've yet to play with free radius, it's just an idea I've had, so I've no idea how complex the database is behind it) If it proves too complex I may bite the bullet and buy the Zyxel solution (money isn't really the issue) but I can't help feeling that we can do something pretty much the same with the tools we already have and get better value out of them. What I don't want to do is have a bunch of generic 'visitors' usernames and passwords because they become too widely known and abused if you're not careful, they must be time limited or single use and randomly generated. Thanks for your help anyone who has any ideas on this, Mike.

Just to get a rough idea of how many (if any) schools are still running CC3 - I'm interested because one of the schools I look after is still running this, and I can't believe they are considering how old the product is now. I'm trying to put forwards an urgent case for them to lose it this summer, but of course it means investing in some new infrastructure which they are really dragging their heels in agreeing to.

didn't 'ME' stand for Mistake Edition?

Hello all, We have 450 iPads, but no printing solution for them. Thus far we have encouraged electronic sharing and sending of work via Dropbox/email/Webdav, but we are now being pushed to supply some form of printing ability from these devices as apparently it's needed. So I've been looking about. I've not been doing any evaluating yet, but a few options spring out at me. 1) We have papercut for our printer/copier management and I know there's an app which works with this for printing, so how effective is that and how does it work? does anyone has experience of it? 2) I've some across Printopia which allows sharing of printers via an apple mac using the Air Print system Printopia - AirPrint to Any Printer - Print from iPad - Print from iPhone - Ecamm Network we have plenty of macs in the building that could act as hosts for this for each department, so has anyone used that and how well does it work? 3) I've found this iPad Printing and iPhone Printing with EFI Fiery direct mobile printing and our Ricoh MFP printers are supported - as we have one of these per department it would be suitable. Has anyone used it and is so, how well does that work? Any other suggestions, has anyone successfully rolled out printing on a large scale like this and managed to retain at least some sort of control over it? Cheers for your help! Mike.

Hi all, Simple one this. We drive our digital signage displays from old netbooks running the Xibo client, mainly because it's cheap and convenient. We've always shoved these up in the ceiling void because it's convenient but our site manager has recently stated this is considered a fire risk and won't let me continue to do this. Can any recommend a simple brakcet that we might be able to use to mount these on the wall behind the screen, they need to be secure to make sure they can't fall off. Regards, Mike.

Hello everyone, Trying to get a bunch of these working on our network for 'evaluation purposes' however I'm having problems. The Android devices I cannot access the Play Store from them which is one of the requirements for this project so that can install things onto the devices themselves. I've looked out our web filtering appliance after I've tried to do it but can't seem to pick apart which URLs it needs. Short of giving them a higher level of access (which does work) i need a list of the URL's these devices use for the playstore if anyone knows? Also we have a couple of chrome books which get stuck at the 'network not available' screen, presumably because the URL they are using for checking their access is not working either. Giving them a ultra high level of acces works, but this is not suitable, so if anyone knows what URL's need unblocking to make chroebooks work properly as well, that woul be handy. Cheers in advance! Mike.

Any ideas how? I'm not overly familiar with the Meru configuration, it was setup for us and I've only made minor changes to it since. I could get the company who set it up to come in and do this, but obviously they'll charge us so I thought I'd have a look myself first, afterall how hard could it be. More tricky than I thought as I don't really understand the way the firewall settings work on the Meru box.

I've been told by our broadband support that iDevices using iMessage and Facetime between each other internally don't go anywhere outside the network, the communication is directly between the devices, hence the need to block this internally and not on the firewall. Our firewall is not aware of our internal VLANS anyway, but we do have a good setup with seperate VLANS for various aspects of the system all on managed switches. Cheers twin--turbo I will have a look at those settings on the Meru controller, that should be a good enough pointer to get me going. Regards, Mike.

Hello All, I am trying to block the use of iMessage and Facetime on iPads on our wireless network. I know the ports I need to block, but can anyone shed light on how I might program this into a meru wireless system, or into the settings for a Vlan on an HP managed switch? I am not the most experienced person when dealing with these types of systems, so an 'idiots guide' would be helpful! Cheers, Mike.

Old dell optiplex 755 desktop from work, a seagate go flex networkd hdd which I store all my media on as it's dlna compatible and works Nicely with my recently purchased Samsung box which plays the media over the network on my tv in the lounge. I use my work iPad and work laptop at home for anything else I need. I have got a couple of old laptops I use for parties for playing music etc. but they spend most of their life in a box. I did go through a phase where I had all sorts of stuff wired up at home just for testing and messing around with, but those days are long gone. Not only does it take up too much room, but if your running just a few machines 24/7 it adds a lot onto your electric bill!

This issue is driving me crazy, literally so if anyone can help I'd be really grateful! The issue is to do with the initialisation of the wireless network on certain machines. The general problem is the wireless network taking over a minute to connect when the machine is started up, the login prompt is there, but any attempt to login wirelessly just results in the error 'there are no logon servers available to service your request' as I'd expect as I've set windows to require a domain controller to login as these are laptops intended for multiple student use. Co-inciding with the lack of connectivity are two errors in the event log for the WLAN-Autoconfig: Event 11002 - wireless network association failed - the driver disconnected while associating Dot11 Status code 2 ; followed by Event 8002 - WLAN autoconfig service failed to connect to a wireless network - the driver disconnected while associating This is consistant almost every boot, although 1 in 5 the WLAN connects fine without a problem. Almost exactly a minute later the Wlan connects fine as it should and you can logon. The GPO controlling the WLAN connection works fine on some of our other windows 7 laptops without these errors. When the Wlan fails association, there is no log of any attempted connection on our Wireless network controller log. We have a meru wireless system backed by MS IAS server for authentication and it is setup in a pretty 'standard' way, nothing special with only a single SSID. Windows XP laptops and some of our windows 7 laptops connect to this without a problem, I am only getting this issue with certain wieless cards it would appear. The Specific laptops I've got problems with are the Dell 5410 laptop with an Intel Centrino N6200 AGN wireless card and a Stone NT309 with an Intel Centrino N6235 wireless card. I have tried loads of different things to solve this amongst them. Removing all GPO's except the wireless settings from the machines Changing just about every setting on the wireless configuration that I can and testing after every change Turning off things like the powersaving options on the wireless card Trying at least 3 or 4 different versions of the Intel Wlan driver Limiting the card to just using G band Deleting and re-installing the drivers totally Changing the service startup order so the networking services are started last and then again so they are started first Uninstalling the antivirus program (sophos in this case) Probably other things I can't think of right now. Absolutely nothing appears to make any difference, these wireless cards keep coming up with this error consistantly almost every boot and I really cannot figure out why. I really need to try and find a solution to this problem so anything else anyone can suggest trying would be very useful. Cheers Mike.

Doesn't even show as connected to the PC, it appears totally 'dead' apart from the LED light on the memorystick. I think my boss has approached the savemyusb company plexer has mentioned as they are about the only people who crop up in a search. I'll feedback here if they are successful. And yes, we all know they should have taken a backup, and shouldn't rely on memorysticks as a means of storage, this is something we keep stressing time and time again. Normally I would be 'tough luck' but in this instance we have no choice but to try anything we can to recover the data. We shall needless to say be re-issuing advice to staff and students not to rely on USB memory sticks, and to use the network storgae spaces provided for them, as these are safe and secure. I've always said to people to use memorysticks as a means of moving data from one place to another, and not as a form of working storage, however there are always some who just plain ignore the advice. We shouldn't even be using them in school anyway unless they're encrypted in my opinion, but that is another discussion altogether.

As per title, are there any companies or methods people know of recorvering data from memorysticks that appear dead. The memory stick has power to it, but is not appearing in windows, and we have examined it for physical damage which might be repairable with a drop of solder. We all know the advise not to rely on them etc. but in this case we need to find any possible method of recovering the data for the user as it is some extreemly important data which has been lost. Many thanks Mike.

Have you exaimned any potential logs on the server to see if anything is happening at that end when Windows trys to redirect the folders? What does it return to you if you type "echo %homepath%" in command prompt when logged on as a user? If I'm reading this correctly then your linux server does something weird to the home drive mapping which might well work for the actual my documents folder, but could cause hassle for folder redirection. Can you turn this feature off and use normal full UNC paths instead of relying on that to do it's job, windows clearly isn't expecting this and although it should appear transparent there's obviously a problem somewhere. Folder redirection has always been a piece of cake everytime I've implemented it, it's just worked and that's on 3 separeate windows 7 based networks now, no hassle with any of them by using the "%homepath%\folder" option for the redirection. Mike.

I've never had much luck with the cheap ones they've always improved it, but never illiminated it. If you've found one which works, any chance of a link? I had a decent one we used in the hall on the large PA setup, but that was about £30 and needed a battery to work, it did a great job thou.

Great video here on how to break 'ground loops' which is what causes noise/hum on amplified speakers or PA equipment connected to a Laptop PC. This is something which has plagued me for years, I always knew it was a ground loop causing it, but I never knew the cure was as simple as changing the type of powersupply you're using on the laptop, obvious when you've watched the video. Mike.

I've been stumped by the same problem and I did the following: Set your users home drive/folder in AD to \\SERVER\SHARE$\USERNAME as normal. Then set each of the folder redirections to "Basic - redirect everyoones folder to the same location" and type in %HOMESHARE%\FOLDER e.g for desktop use %HOMESHARE%\Desktop etc. You will get an error when you save the setting warning you about UNC paths, but it should work. I have never got it to work with the "create a folder for each user on this share" or any other way, but this way does work for me, so it might work for you! Mike.

Some good responses here, thanks. Just to state we are not considering doing this, it was just interesting that the consultant was thinking this way and I was absolutely sure there was some legal precident like the Act they have in america that specifically governs this, but as far as I can see in the UK there is no such act. I just thought I'd pose the question and see what peoples opinions/thoughts were. I can see an arguement for a more relaxed policy, obviously blocking the stuff we defiinitely don't want kids accessing for good reason (goes without saying) but sites that pose no 'risk' as such and are just a distraction such as shopping sites, games, youtube etc. you do have to question whether the focus should be more on educating the students/staff to use the resources properly rather than a technical solution of blocking the sites. The Consultants angle was that by blocking large swathes of the internet, you are in a way potentially hampering the students use of technology by dictating to a very fine level what they can and cannot access, blocking potential innovation and potentially good resources in the process and that controlling internet access like this does more harm than good. I can sorta see where he is coming from as well.

As per title, is it actually a legal requirement for schools to monitor and filter internet use, or is it just adviseable and something which has evolved from the historic use of internet in schools. This stems from a conversation I had earlier today with a consultant who hinted at the idea that in the future students would most likely have un-filtered and un-monitored access to the internet, and he said there was no legal requirement as such for the school to actually monitor or filter internet content, which I always thought was the case. After a liberal amount of googling, I can't actually find anything that states this, only policy documents from various schools and LEA's which on their own are not law as such. Anyone shed some light on this, and anyone have any opinions on this (I'm sure you all do) Mike.