maniac

Best mistake my friend ever made was accidently ordering tickets for stafford V-Festival instead of Chelmsford. I will always thank him for messing up that one, as the stafford appearance at V-Festival will go down as the last time they played together in their current form, and they were pretty damn good actually. Mike.

I'd recommend using Xibo, which is free and opensource. You don't need massively powerful PCs to run it if you're just wanting to do a simple slideshow or scrolling text etc. http://xibo.org.uk/ We use old laptops that have suffered with broken screens as the clients as they work perfectally well on the VGA output still, and they're small so we can just hide them above ceiling tiles and set them to power on automatically. We use an old workstation as the server. This works well for us controlling 5 screens. Mike.

It's gone in the skip I'm afraid, got rid of 2 of them - couldn't find homes for either of them. Mike.

They're making up for the previous 6 years, which is how long XP was with us until it's sucessor was released, making it the longest running edition of windows ever so far. Look at the late 90's, Windows NT4, 95, 98, ME and 2000 all within 5 years of each other, then XP a year later and then no new desktop OS for 6-7 years. That's a very long gap considering the previous 5-6 years of development. I guess we're at the same stage again now, Vista then less than 3 years later Windows 7 so how long until the next edition? I'm placing my bets on another desktop OS release around late 2011 early 2012 then another long gap. Mike.

Active Directory will do this for you, I don't know why a lot of people don't take advantage of the fact that it's all geared up to do it providing you set it up correctly. Why make this simple task any harder than it has to be? What you need to do is share the root of the student home directories, and map the home folders through the one share instead of having individual shares for each user. It does work and is a perfectly acceptable, safe and reliable method of providing home folders. The way we do it is as follows; We have a share called Folders on our storage server which is shared as folders$ on the server. Each year group has a sub folder in this The users home folders are sub folders of the relevant year group. The important thing before you do anything else is to turn off inheritance of permissions and set the students group on your network to have read only access for this folder only otherwise the home folders will inherit the permissions, and you end up in the nightmare scenario where students can read each others home folders. Set the permissions properly at this stage and there's no worries security wise. Also add any other groups you want to have access to the student folders and set the permissions accordingly. It's easier to do this now, as once you have a load of folders and data in them it takes a while to change NTFS permissions. You don't even need to give students full read permissions, you can get away with Read Attributes, Read Extended Attributes and Read Permissions at this point, it will stop students being able to browse the root folder, but it still lets them access folders further up the tree that they have correct permissions for. Word of caution, if you use offline files, users will require full read access to the root of the share or syncronisation won't work. Incidently on the sharing tab, make sure that everyone is granted full permissions. The NTFS permissions you set on the security tab will keep everyone out of places they shouldn't be, you can pretty much dis-regard the actual sharing permissions. You can get active directory to create and set permissions on all the home folders for your users in one go by selecting them all at once, RH clicking and going to properties. Tick the box for connect home folder to, and select the drive letter you want to use, then type the correct UNC path using %username% on the end. e.g. \\SERVER\FOLDERS$\YEAR07\%username% Windows will then create all the folders for you, and set the permissions on them as well in about 5 seconds flat, Job done. It works, and in my opinion it's a whole lot easier than using scripts or 3rd party applications and what's more once you've got it working, any new users you setup will automatically get their home folder created for them and the permissions set. If I remember rightly, this is Microsoft's recommended method of assigning home folders to users on Server 2000 and 2003 which is why it works so well. I hope that's of some help, Mike. edit: sorry if that sounds like a rant, but why use scripts when it's all there built into windows already?

You can indeed using good old group policy. Look in Computer config, Windows Settings, Security Settings, Local Policies, user rights assignment. Look down the list for the "logon Locally" section and add a group containing the users who you want to allow access to log onto the machine. This will over write any existing settings on the machine, so will then only allow those users to logon. You can do it in reverse as well. look down the list for for "Deny Logon Locally" and add a group to this section that contains all the users you don't want to be able to logon to the machine. Either way will work, I do this to staff laptops to stop students logging onto them, and to student machines to stop staff using them. works a treat! Mike.

Have you tried setting the menu timeout to Zero? Mike.

I've worked with a vast array of different projectors in my time in schools, probably every major make there is. I've concluded the following. It doesn't matter how much you clean the projector and maintain it, it will fail eventually one way or another, and probably within a 5 year period. Schools are very dusty dirty environments, and the equipment is never looked after as well by its users as it might be in other places. It will get left on, it will be turned off without cooling down properly, and probably be in a much hotter environment that it was designed for. DLP projectors are very poor for colour reproduction, but offer excellent resilience so are a good choice for very dirty areas such as DT labs, but a poor choice for subjects like art which need good colour reproduction. DLP projectors are generally dimmer than their LCD counterparts, but tend to run quieter in my experience. There no doubt about it, the technology has moved on massively in 4-5 years. We had a lot of 4 year old units at my last school, which were always over heating, cutting out for no apparent reason, took an absolute age to cool down or initialise when you powered them up and didn't support resolutions past 800x600. They were very expensive in their day. Even a very cheap projector brought brand new today offers a better image than they did. As for differences between manufacturers, like everything there will be good models and bad models with each manufacturer. The key is getting one with a good warranty that covers you for these sorts of failures. Definitely get a swap out or on site warranty, that way you don't have to send things for repair. The only one I can comment on is Epson, as it's the only brand I've ever had to claim for under warranty for a projector. They sent an engineer the next day with a brand new projector and swapped it no questions asked. He didn't even turn it on and look at it, just swapped it - can't do better than that. I would budget to replace projectors every 5 years roughly, you don't necessarily have to tear down all of them and replace them, but just make sure the money is in the budget. I've never seen a projector work for significantly longer than this if it's used regularly.

I was plain lucky with my first job in a support role and got it through a friends recomendation to the school that they take me on. Was there for 2 years then moved onto a different job at a larger school which was better paid. Was there just over 2 years gained a lot of experience there, then managed to land the job I have now as systems Manager of a medium size secondary school. I'm very lucky because I have no qualifications at all, what I've managed to do is get employers to buy into me as a person, which is just as important as what you know or can do. Keep your ear to the ground, and make sure everyone you know knows you're looking for work, as sometimes it can be that one person who just happens to know somewhere that's looking for someone. Be prepared to accept a lower paid support role to start with, even though you're qualified you will still need to prove your worth to any employer I'm afraid, but if you're any good you'll find yourself at the top of the tree relatively quickly as I've found once you have some experience, it's not that difficult to move onto better positions in other schools or organisations. I wish you the best of luck. Mike.

Congrats on passing. One of these days I will actually go and get myself some qualifications.

We are going to supply 1 in-ear headphone set per student at the beginning of this year, and if they break or lose them then they will have to supply a new pair themselves. If you hunt around the internet, you can get bulk deals on them for as cheap as 50p a pair, and that works out a lot cheaper than buying decent headphones for the places that need or want them. Mike.

Make of memory, at least for machines I buy for work, has never really concerned me, more interested to make sure it's a decent speed. Everything I buy has a minimum of 3 years warranty on it anyway, so it's in the manufacturers best interests to use good quality components or they'll spend a fortune in support calls! Mike.

Having worked with Both Sercos product and Sims, I can see the advantages and disadvantages of both systems. SIMS is well established, well supported and generally quite stable. Also their interface is in my opinion very intuitive, the reporting interface is good and it runs quite swiftly on a good speced workstation. However it lacks in one big way, and that is the web interface for it is very poor, and requires as has been stated additional licenses to function in an organisation. Sercos product has an excellent web interface which is very highly developed and means the teaching staff don't need the full client installed on their machines, and you can offer outside access for teaching staff, and logins for parents and carers without buying any additional licenses. It doesn't even need IIS to run on, as it installs with Apache Tomcat, although I think Serco recommend using IIS to host it through. However the CMIS product that is used for administation in offices is in my opinion very poor in comparison with the SIMS interface, although it has one key advantage - it will run off a network share and doesn't need installing onto every machine it's used on! The best outcome would be a hybrid of the two, the sims interface for office administration and reporting and the Serco E-portal interface for the teaching staff and parent/carer access. Shame you can't pick individual components of different systems like that Mike.

Same here, we have 30 of their all in one PCs built exactly to spec as expected, and they've been absolutely faultless for the last 8-10 months. We have another 36 machines that have just been delivered, all exactly to spec as well. They detail on the specification sheet exactly what processor and motherboard they are going to use, so if it's not as specified then questions would be asked, but it always has been. Also have 30 of their Neo netbooks on their way to me as well, and I've just had 5 projectors installed by their AV engineers who turned up exactly on time and completed the work absolutely to spec neatly and tidily. I've never had a bad experience with Stone, so I'm always puzzled when I read negative reports, as some of the things stated above are complete breaches of the sale of goods act, and I'd be surprised if any large company would even dare take that risk, as the fines for miss-describing goods like that are pretty huge. Mike.

We buy all our PCs with no optical drive, less for the kids to break! The only machines in our school which do have DVD writers are the PCs in the Art/design area which have photoshop and video editing software on. For normal classroom PCs they are merely something else to break in my opinion. It's pretty common these days for small form factor PCs to come with the laptop style drives - the Dell Ultra small form factor PCs have been shipped with them for years, and RM use them on both their old and new all in one PC. Mike.

Not sure if you thought about this, but running a server 24/7 uses more electricity than you think. I did in my rental house for a few months until we got the first bill. Second quarter I kept it off most of the time and the bill halved, that was definitely a significant cost increase to the bill. Mike.

You'll love this then -the building we've just spent all this money on is due to be flattened in 3 years time for a brand new building that's going on the field opposite. We weren't intending to do this much work to the old building, but we really need to improve the existing facilities as the new building was supposed to be with us by now, but due to various political reasons has been delayed again and again and again! That part of the school is the newest part we have, but it's not that new - 1970's build - but has been refurnished at least once in its life. Our site team do a fantastic job of maintaining our buildings, even the 1930's part of our school is immaculate. Mike.

I've been told by our business manager that it is very dodgy ground to be accepting any sort of gift or incentive from a company or to base any decision making on gifts or incentives offered. The main reason being that we are spending public money at the end of the day and have to demonstrate best value at all times. Gifts and incentives can be seen as making this process unfair by some. Mike.

You can control membership of the local administrators group through Group policy. We do it this way, and have two domain groups - one called local administrators and one called local power users which are automatically added to their respective group on the local machine when group policy is applied. We can then add and remove staff from these groups, and it changes their permission on the local machine. Mike.

I lost 3 drives out of a 6 drive RAID 5 array when I downed a server at the beginning of the holidays that had been on pretty much constantly for over 2 years. It's always the time when the drives are going to fail when they've been running a long time. Always make sure you have a good backup before turning off a server, just incase!

Richcopy just did not work for me when I tried it recently for migrating all my data to my new domain, it literally crashed out after a few minutes and produced a serious error report every time I tried it. I used Robocopy with the GUI so save having to type it in on the command line, that completed very very quickly, and produced a nice log file of everything it copied. Not one single error reported throughout the whole process. I believe someone on here is working on a file moving tool to do the same sort of things as robocopy/richcopy as well. Mike.

They are Dell GX260's and they are about 5-6 years old. Pentium 4 2GHz, 256-512MB ram, no idea on the disc size probably 20-40GB. They still work but they're so naff we just need to be rid of them. I've given several away to people, there's about 12 left looking for homes. Not sure about the license stickers, we install using a VLK so I've never really paid much attention to them, I expect most of them have been ripped off thou, it's usually the case. Mike.

I know, it was only a tongue in cheek comment. Because they are famed for their reliability, and it's very rare to get faults like freezing on them, the opportunity for a poorly executed sarcastic comment was just too good to miss.

They're showing This is Spinal Tap at the open air cinema at St Augustines Abbey in Canterbury at the end of this month, should be quite a laugh I think Open Air Cinema in St Augustine's Abbey - St Augustine's Abbey - Canterbury website - E&A Details http://www.thescreenonthegreen.com/#/canterbury/4534066210 Mike.

We've just had one of our colour photocopiers moved into a little room with no outside ventilation. I had to put my foot down there and insist they got a good extractor fan fitted, as our reprographics person would have probably been quite ill being stuffed in that room with the copier going all the time! Mike.