maniac

Silly suggestions, but you might be more likey to have these, Aftershave or Lynx deodorant will do it. Mike.

I've held off doing this, becuase we would have to buy all office 2007 licenses because we don't have any at the moment, all ours are 2003 - the last batch were brought shortly before 2007 came out looking back at invoices. I'm trying to steer the school towards Open office, and our new director of learning for ICT is also a big open source fan, so I'm hoping we can hold off until the next release of office, which must be due in 2010/11 before we'll have to buy any licenses at all, and even then it may only be for admin and staff machines. Mike.

Just measured it, it's a bit smaller than you were after at only 420mm deep from the brackets to the back of the cabinet. The rails could be moved forward a bit, although you wouldn't have any room for wiring if you did that. You are more than welcome to it and would be fine to pick it up Sunday afternoon if you wanted it. I'll PM you a phone number. Mike.

Have you got all the necessary files in the fogcrypt directory? there should be Fogcrypt.exe IniReaderObj.dll and a directory called etc which contains a configuration file. As long as you've got them all, there's no reason it shouldn't work. Mike.

Download Ubuntu on CD, and install it on an old box - takes about 10 minutes even if you've never done it before. Then follow the really well written instructions on the fog wiki to install fog. You'll get it up and running in no time, trust me it really isn't anything to shy away from. There's 100's of websites out there to guide you though using linux, and if you get stuck just ask away here as there's loads of fog users on here like myself who will more than happily help you out. Mike.

It's command line based. Goto command prompt, and get to the Fogcrypt directory then type Fogcrypt yourpassword You should get a response like F:\FOGCrypt>fogcrypt password Input string: password Passkey: ############# Output: 52498fbfb2bba2c02ec81c17036949b9 Copy and paste the output string into fog in the password field and it will then allow Fog to add the machine to the domain. Also one gotcha with this which caught me out, you MUST have the microsoft support tools installed on the workstation that fog is adding to the network, specifically the program netdom.exe is needed to perform the domain functions. Mike.

I really recommend you look at FOG, trust me you'll never look back! See resent discussion http://www.edugeek.net/forums/nix/35425-fog-awesome.html I personally wouldn't even bother looking at ghost, why pay for something which you can do for free elsewhere? WDS works, but can be a pain in the backside to configure and injecting network drivers into the winPE boot environment can be tricky. Mike.

The other thing if you prefix them all with the same name they then all end up in the same place if you browse the network to find one. One school I worked in they were just called DC01, EXCHANGE, STORAGE etc. which meant they were all over the place in the list. Mike.

Tell me about it! I'm not that bothered at losing the store room thou, as it's helped de-clutter my depertment - there was an awful lot of rubbish stored up from the last 5 years of ICT in the school. I don't think a single thing had ever been thrown out! It's not going to make a very nice office, as there's still the CCTV recorders in there in a cabinet and a large network wiring cabinet all making a lot of noise, so I think we'll end up getting it back at some point. It just means there's no where for big deliveries when they arrive, but we'll manage.

Depends what you're into as to what path you'll want to take. Teaching ICT is a whole different career to being a technician/network manager. If you want to go into the technical side, I would get a well qualified as you can, as competition for even basic technical roles is quite high owing to the number of students rolling out universities in the last 10 years with IT related qualifications. Experience is often equally as important as qualifications, so any chance for work experience in a IT related role, take it - even if it's volunteer work. Also I'm presuming you're still at school, so never be afraid to ask questions to the technical team at your school. Providing it doesn't compromise their system, I expect a lot will be quite pleased that someone's actually interested in the technical side, and will happily answer your questions and show off their server room to you, I know I'm only to pleased when students show an interest where I work, and they may even let you help out if you're lucky. Mike.

it's in good condition, has the door and I'm sure I can find a key for it (it's a pretty universal cabinet key) I'm in Canterbury in Kent. I've had a couple of interested people, but no one has definitely confirmed they are picking it up yet, so first come first served. I'll measure the depth tomorrow as I'm not sure how deep it is. It really needs to go by July 1st at the latest, as that's when the rest of the gear I'm recycling gets disposed of, and the store room it's in needs to be empty by then as it's being converted into yet another office!

Sounds boring, but with that many servers, believe me it's much easier to use a proper naming convention, or sometimes it can get confusing. You get used to them, true, but it can be a nightmare if anyone new starts, or if anyone works on your system. Mine are going to be based on the template SA-DC01 (SA being the initials of the academy, DC01-Domain Controller 01) If you want to use names, one I would love to see would be names of pokemon characters, purely cos they're so silly! Go on, you know you want to Mike.

I've already replied to his thread, but he's in Bath so I don't think he'll want to drive all this way, but you never know!

Canterbury.

I'll have a second one in August so if you can get it collected, you can have that one instead! We're having a massive re-organisation of cabling and consolidating a lot of it into one single cabinet. We also have a few places where there were 2 cabinets, (formerly one for the admin network and one for the curriculum network) which I have merged into single cabinets now as well - the networks been one big network since before I started it was one of those jobs no one's ever got round to doing. Mike.

As title says, it's surplus to requirements and unfortunitely I have no where to store it. Free to a good home if it can be picked up by the end of the week, or unfortunitely it will end up in a skip, as I really can't keep it any longer. (Not sure on the depth of it, it's about the same depth as one of those brown metal cabinets that you get quite often in schools as it's currently on one of those and it's about the same size!) Mike.

I have a 9U cabinet that you can have for free. Problem is I'm located in Kent. I'm not sure how deep it is mind you, but if you do want it then I'll measure it and let you know. I'll have a second one of them in August when we re-organise yet more cabling in the building. Mike.

We only have one, but we are planning to launch more web services over the next year, so will probably need 2 or maybe more. Ours are self signed at the moment, and the staff get damned confused when they get the warning screen. One of the things to sort out for the summer is getting a signed certificate! Mike.

The offline files cache is stored in a completely different place, the best article to read is this Microsoft knowledgebase one Structure of the Offline Files Cache Folder Word of warning, if more than one user has logged onto the laptop then there will be multiple users files all jumbled up in that folder, and also if you have encryption turned on for your offline files, you won't be able to read them by putting the drive into another machine. Best thing to do is back up that entire hard drive somewhere, then try and repair windows XP. the offline files cache should remain preserved as will all the users settings. Mike.

Use steadystate, it allows you to lock the machine down in the same way as you would on a network, and you can customise the start menu and desktop by editing the user profile folders. I used it on a couple of machines we had for video editing that I didn't want to be on the network, worked a treat! Mike.

You have to use a little program called Fogcrypt, which is on the fog server. My advice is to create a specific add2domain account for fog to use, and not to use the normal administrators account for this purpose, because everytime you change your administrators password you'll have to change all the passwords in fog, which can be a right pain in the backside when you've got several hundred machines in it! Mike.

This is true, I was speaking to the IT support at one of our academy sponsors the other week, and they were astounded at how cheaply we get licenses for software, their commercial license for a program like microsoft office is around 5x what we pay on select! Mike

Our 6.5GB image uploads in about 20mins, and deploys in about 5 or 6 minutes. I would expect a 19GB image to upload in about an hour, and deploy in about 18-20 mins based on the same network speed. We did have a batch of Dell D520 laptops which took over an hour to pull down the 6.5GB image. We found that changing the linux kernal to one of the alturnatives on offer made a big difference, so that might be worth a try. You can get to this through the 'other information' menu and select kernel updates from the side menu. Mike.

Has anyone found an un-peelable labeling system? We use a dymo label printer at the moment, which is great except the tape costs about £15 a roll, and we're currently going through a roll every few weeks relabelling laptops and laptop cabinets where the damned kids keep peeling them off. Aside from etching the laptop number into the machine (which I don't want to do, because sometimes they get re-numbered as they move into different parts of the school) is there a kidproof way of labelling laptops? Cheers Mike

Must be a different version to the one that I was using. The version of classlink (which I think was classlink 2000) that I used about 4 or 5 years ago didn't install anything on the clients, if you moved them out of the classlink OU within active directory, they simply behaved as a normal workstation all the changes were done through group policies.