maniac

Same here, 'facebook.com' is blocked by websense, you don't even need to put * at the beginning, if you block the domain with no 'www' before it, it blocks all variations. Mike.

That's a perfectally plausable explanation, and there's a group policy setting for stopping machine accounts expiring so I'm going to enable that and see what happens! Mike.

We had no internet for an hour or so this afternoon, you would have thought the world had come to an end! Also showed how few staff read their e-mail, the minute we realised the problem e-mail to all staff explaining the problem, what was being done and that we would send out another e-mail when we knew more information or the problem had been fixed. I think we had at least 10 students queueing up at the door all asking the same question Also why do teachers not believe you when you say there's nothing you can actually do about it, and they'll have to wait for the problem to be fixed by our LEA. "But there must be some you can ring?" er yes, and I've done that already. "can't you ring them again?" and it went on from there. Mike.

Old thread reserrected from the depths of the forum, but I'm having a very simelar problem to the ones described in this thread and was wondering has anyone ever found a solution to this? In all other respects my wireless network works fine, but ocassionally I get clients that just will not authenticate to it unless I wire them onto the network and do a GPupdate then re-boot them, very strange problem and not been able to find any sort of pattern to it yet. So if anyone can shed light on why this happens, I'd ve very grateful! Mike.

Oh, I don't know it's not all that bad . . . . .

As other people have said, within Active Directory look at the 'Exchange General' properties for the Distribution List, and set it so only staff can send to it. We do that here to stop the students e-mailing any of the distribution lists we have, like the all students and all staff lists and it works a treat. Mike.

794, 675th Failed at the memory one, I'm naff at remembeing stuff.

November 18th at around 3:00pm

Most departments at this school have a B/W laser, with maths, english and Science also having a colour one as well. They can decide where they want them, but that's all the printers they get. Admin offices have a printer in each office, and a few others scattered around the building, but I've phased out all the inkjets over the last year, we don't support them now and once the current stock of ink is exhausted, that will be it for inkjet printers - they're too messy, un-reliable, slow and expensive to seriously consider keeping. Staff without a printer in their room are able to print to our staff room printer or the printers in our enterprise area which are available to everyone, and are high yield cheap to run printers. Mike.

Hello Nick, I presume it's the same Nick Day I worked with for 2 years?? We have one or two students who use laptops offsite here, I wrote a seperate slightly more relaxed group policy to allow them to do things like connect to home networks. As long as you ensure the only icons in the system tray are harmless ones there's no harm enabling the system tray. Alturnatively you could provide a shortcut to the wireless network by going to control panel, network connections, RH click the relevant network connection and create shortcut. I'm pretty sure providing the laptops are all the same with the same wireless adapter that the same shortcut should work on all of them, although you would need to test this. The shortcut will bring up the wireless properties box as if you'd double clicked the tray icon. There's a high chance you'll have to make some GPO adjustments anyway to allow students access to the properties of network connections in order to allow this to work properly. Mike.

I've been buying stone PCs the lest couple of years, and Not had any real problems. 1 minor issue with a sound card and one monitor has died in an All In One PC that's all. We've got about 80 Stone desktops and a set of 28 of their neo netbooks. Mike.

Look at the NETDOM program, included with the windows support tools, which allows you to add machines to the domain and rename machines from the command line - I'm sure it wouldn't be to hard to write this into a batch file using the set /p command to prompt for user input where necessary. Mike.

We use papercut here to manage our printing system, introduced this year. Students have a £5 allowance, with printing changed at 5p per B/W and 10p per colour printout. This is a termly allowance for years 10 and 11 who have a lot of coursework to print, and a bi-termly allowance for other year groups, and they can accumulate it. Staff have a £10 personal allowance with the same printing charges, and also have a £50 department allowance (although we are looking at setting different limits for different departments next year based on what they have printed this year.) with papercut you can get a popup box to be displayed which summerises the print job, and the member of staff can them tell the program what account to charge depending on what they are printing. This extra step has really made staff think about what they are printing. No one can print any more than 3 copies of a document, they're suppsoed to use photocopying for this. Duplicate documents submitted within 5 minutes get disallowed to stop circumnavigating this rule Student print jobs have to be authorised by a member of staff before they can print. I've set papercut to stick them in a holding queue, and given a basic print management login to staff members so they can login and release print jobs. Any print job not released gets deleted after 30mins. This caused confusion when first introduced, but has been very successful at stopping wastage. Mike.

This should do the trick - it's VBS script. Const OverWriteFiles = True Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") If Not objFSO.FolderExists("c:\folder\path\here") then objFSO.CopyFolder "\\server\share\foldername" , "C:\folder\path\here" , OverWriteFiles End if

Basically the staff in our new business centre would like headset mics so they can address the whole class easily without having to shout, as it's such a large space. This is the sort of thing Shure WH20QTR Headset Microphone | DV247 but we would like ones with a push-to-talk button on the cable so they can choose easily when their voice is heard. Also as they are going to be used everyday, we're looking for a wireless pack to go with them which is rechargeable, preferably in some sort of cradle so we don't get through batteries like water! I've had a look on websites like the above one, but there's so much to chose from I really don't know where to start - microphones are not my area really, although there's no one else to ask which is why I've been asked to sort these out. I know it's going to cost a fair bit for a decent setup, but they're prepared to pay as it will be well used. Anyone able to help? Mike.

During our recent rebuilding of our domain, we installed the latest versions of everything, including shockwave player. Music teacher has just reported errors using the BBC radio 3 making tracks composer http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/makingtracks/ which runs in shockwave. When the students call it up, shockwave tries to install 'compatibility componants' which obviously fails because the students don't have the necessary rights to complete the installation. Turns out this is to do with backwards compatibility with older shockwave versions, and is stupidly turned off by default unless you specifically turn it on when you install shockwave - we didn't. Anyone know of a way of remotely installing shockwave with 'backwards compatility' mode turned on to save me re-imaging everything just to get rid of this one irritating error? Mike.

Can't believe the CMOS battery is low! I remember using those type of RM machines on an RM NET LM2.0 network at my school when I was a student! Infact they were the better machines, the bulk of the network was 386/20Mhz machines in the even older style case! I believe they were £1000 each when they were brand spanking new!

Fraid to say he's right. This is a link to the Kent LEA document http://www.eiskent.co.uk/docs/09-E31.doc it's publically viewable on the EIS website, so don't see the harm in linking it here. Mike.

One of the things you could do straight away to speed up your login times is exclude certain folders from your current roaming profile. Specifically Local Settings, Cookies and User Data can all be excluded from roaming without affecting the users ability to roam, and it will speed up your logins. Slow logins are caused by too much data being copied from the network to the machines at login. It doesn't matter what wireless system you have, if you log 30 machines on in the same area at the same time and they are all copying massive roaming profiles, it's going to take a while to logon. This document is very good reading, and can help you understand the limitations of wireless networking, and also what you can do to maximise your chances of making it work. http://www.networksfirst.com/admin/files/Factors%20Affecting%20WLAN%20Performance%2007.05.08.pdf Mike.

My main reason for running them myself, the kids hate me for it!

I think this topic has come up for discussion before. None of my racks in this school are earthed except by the equipment that's inside them which is plugged into the normal electricity outlets and earthed this way. I spoke in depth to an engineer about this who said it's not actually a requirement, but is recommended for big installations and in most places they wouldn't earth the rack just the equipment that's inside it, and also modern circuit breakers would trip long before there was any risk of someone actually getting hurt. We actually had an incident a while back where a laptop power lead got caught in the door of one of our cabinets and was damaged, but the power tripped out without anyone even noticing. It took a while for the site guys to track down what was causing it to trip every time they tried to reset the breaker, we were quite amazed when we saw the damage the next day, but also relieved that the electrical safety systems worked as they should have. Mike.

Kent also have this page on the BBC website. BBC - Kent - School closures in Kent & Medway Wat might be better is if there's a way of harnessing the information from pages like the KMFM and BBC page into your service, then you have a reliable source for information to use, and the added benefit of your service to sell. I could see some schools being irritated at a service publishing important information like that about their school that they have no control over. I'm pretty sure if I went to our academy leader and told him about it now and the way it worked, he would ask to be withdrawn from it as we have enough trouble getting the students here as it is sometimes, without false information going to parents - even if it is 'unverified' it would still cause problems. Mike.

It's a good idea, but Is the fundamental flaw in the system I'm afraid, e.g If the kids got hold of it in certain schools they would like nothing better than to keep changing the status to closed, then open, then closed, then open etc. because they know the problems that could create, that would prompt someone getting in touch with the school and phonecalls from parents wanting to know if it really is closed, which would irritate the admin staff and eventually the school would make a request to be removed from the service becuase it causes more problems than it solved. It needs to be a secure signup and verification process for the school so that there's an authorised account for each school that can make the change, or other validated sources that can be fed into the system e.g BBC local news webpages often carry school closure lists, and these sources are verified because the schools have to validate their identity with the BBC before they'll broadcast that their school is closed. Just a thought, Mike.

We've got a lot of Dell kit in this school, probably about 300 laptops, and 50+ desktop PCs, but we've always brought through a re-seller who also handles our warranty claims. The service is pretty good when done like this, there's always an engineer on site the next day for all warranty claims we've ever made through Dell and the kit is always delivered on time. I've never tried going direct, and by the sounds of it I'm not going to bother. http://www.ictltd.co.uk/index.php?cID=1 is the reseller we use - website's basic but the service is excellent. Mike.

FOTO.com United Kingdom : Photo on canvas Do a 2ft square canvas print for £53, which is pretty reasonable. There are lots of other places, but if you look at the prices they're all roughly the same. I've used Foto.com for 12x8 prints before, and was impressed with the quality and speed of delivery, not tried the canvas prints thou. Mike.