maniac

Also burn the disc as a single session, and make sure you close the disc after you've burnt it. Most applications that burn audio CDs will do this automatically anyway, but not all! Also use better quality CDR's - I find TDK ones work well, but really cheap non braded ones can be problematic. Windows Mediaplayer works well at creating them for me. Mike

Not that it will mkake any difference. The influenza virus can only survive for about 3-4 hours outside of the human body, so there won't be any virus left on the keyboards after being left overnight anyway. More effective would be cleaning the keyboards and mice between different groups of students using them. What I would do is bulk buy in some disinfectant wipes, and the students could be responsible for wiping their own keyboard and mouse when they have finished using the laptop - I can't see any other workable solution and it is what I will propose here should it be deamed necessary in the coming weeks. Mike.

Just found in my own course of reseach that you can block clients1.google.com and it stops it working. Result!

I've noticed this has been on google for a few weeks now, but I didn't really think about it until our LRC manager brought it to my attention that it's coming up with some quite in-appropreate suggestions sometimes for students when they're searching. for instance type in 'How long does' and the first hits you get is 'how long does cocane stay in your system' which we'd rather the kids wern't searching for. They still can't get on any websites they shouldn't of course, but we'd rather ideas for searches like this wern't put in their heads to start with, as now they keep typing in words to see what it suggests searching for. Anyone know if you can turn this feature off, or block access to the servers that perform it? Mike.

Keep at it! It took me 3 years to break into the IT industry, I worked in retail for the interim period while applying for every ICT vacancy going, including ones I felt I wasn't qualified for. Eventually I got lucky and got a job, and I've slowly worked my way up the ladder from Technican to Network manager working in 3 different schools over tha last 5 years. Are you getting as far as interviews for some of the jobs you've applied for, or are you just getting no where at all? If you're not even getting interviews, maybe you need to revise your CV and letter writing skills to make you stand out from the crowd a bit more.

Because we want to loose RM CC3, that's why we're doing it all at once. The network backend here hasn't seen any significant investment for 5 years or so apart from renewing server 1 last year which they were forced to do because the old one died. This was before I started, and I understand it cost about £10k in total just to renew this server once RM had charged all their labour, and resulted in 3 days of downtime, that's the sort of situation I'm trying to avoid. No 5 year plan at the moment, I've only been here 8 months, and pretty much everything needs to be renewed. A majority of my workstations are 5 year old Dell pentium 4 2.0GHz machines, I have 200 Hewlett Packard TC1100 tablet PCs running at 700MHz with 256MB ram that are about as useless as a chocolate fireguard, and basically whole network has lacked investment for so long we're playing catchup majorly. We do have a number of newer machines, but the stuff that's 4-5 years old out numbers the newer equipment by some considerable margin. We also have an expanding role, so the number of machines is going up, meaning all my money is spent just replacing broken hardware, and buying stuff for new areas of the school, but not actually replacing anything than needs to be replaced. Everything is kept until it physically drops to pieces, the kids have no respect for it and the staff hate using it. I want to get the back end sorted out first so that I know that is all good, and then start renewing workstations in batchs in subsequent years. If I know the servers are going to need significant investment again in 5 years time then this can at least be planned for, the problem I've got is there's so much that really needs doing this year due to under investment in the past. Anyhow, I've revised my figure and e-mailed the relevant people. If we can't spend that much, then will they consider spending a smaller amount for us to do the work in house buying lower spec hardware, and sticking with server 2003/exchange 2003 insted of upgrading, but with the expectation that it may not be as long lived as the origenal proposal. We'll see what happens. Cheers for everyone's input. Mike.

Basically it boils down to the fact that I've recently been told that people higher up in the tree than me would rather I didn't spend £10's of thousends on a new network setup this year for many reasons, which I won't go into now. It's a pain in the backside, because I've spent the last 3 months researching very carefully what we could change to, and have had many consultants and engineers in to advise and provide quotations for different bits and pieces, we were pretty much at the stage where we could place an order. Then I got told that they no longer wanted to make that investement at the moment. The reasons they have given are perfectally valid and I totally understand why, but I did rather arogantly turn round to the business manager and say 'we've got to, the network just isn't going to last another year in it's current state' Thing is I'm now questioning my judgement, and wondering whether I've been spoilt by previous schools I've worked in having very up-to-date technology, and been very single track minded on wanting to change what we have for no other reason than I 'think' we should. Bear with me a minute or two while I describe my current scinario, and see what you think. We are currently an RMCC3 school, we have 330 Wireless laptops and about 140 Desktops for student use, and 65 Staff laptops, and around 15 staff Desktops around the school. As you can see, it's not exactly a small network. We have RM servers running the main system, with a SIMS server, proxyserver etc but they don't matter as they are fairly new, and would have been kept. It's the mainstay servers of the network that are the issue. Server 1 is fairly new, after its predecessor failed last year, It has around 200GB storage on it, and is a well speced server. However, most of the available storage on it is used as it's the most reliable server on the network, we currently have around 12GB free for staff areas and about 50GB free for student areas (years 7, 8 and 9) on that server. Server 2 is very old, at least 5 years, it's still running server 2000 and doesn't do anything except RADIUS authentication for our wireless system. IT has a habbit of falling over about ever 2 or 3 weeks at the moment. Server 3 is the same as Server 2, and hosts out shared drives, has around 30GB free on it. It also hosts some printers. We have had 2 failed drives in the last 6 months on this server, and it hates being restarted, often hanging on the BIOS screen. Server 4 is around 3 years old, and has about 140GB of storage on it. This server is the second most reliable server on the network, and hosts all our printers, and the year 11 and 12 user areas, as well as running our intranet, helpdesk system, Eclipse and a couple of other SQL databases for other programs. Exchange server is the same age as server 2 and 3 and is running exchange 2003. It struggles, but is actually reasonably reliable. Now my question is this, am I just being single minded in insisting we renew this lot with a brand new setup? What would you do, risk it and make the best of it for another 17 months or keep insisting that the investment was made? I've been assured that we would be able to renew it next year if we don't this year, as we would be able to draw on money that's available for a new building project that's in the works at the moment. I fear that may be too late, but I'm wondering if I'm just over reacting and playing it too safe. The network is a little on the slow side, but does need a lot of TLC to keep it running, like regularly re-booting of servers and regular clear outs of stuff from the kids areas to stop all the space being used up. To the end users the system appears reliable, behind the scenes it's a little chaotic somtimes, but downtime has been less than a day since September. I think because we're so good at keeping it working, they don't see the need to change it because to them it appears to work, and appears to be reliable. I think the business manager thinks I'm being two closed minded about the situation, and that we could 'struggle through' which I protested at when he said it, but thinking about it, maybe I am? (Incidently the proposed new network will be non RM, which saves us £10k a year already on RM licensing, support and warranty extensions for our aging servers. The quotes for it were coming in around the £55k mark, with room to shave off some of the 'would be nice' extras we don't necessarily need.) Any advice appriciated, because I've either got to accept what they've said and make the best of it, or give a damn good convincing arguement (which isn't too much technical jargon about server lifespans and the like) to push the project through. Cheers, Mike And if you've read this far, well done!

I'm seriously considering them for PE teachers, 3 broken laptops in 6 months from that department!

The comanie's called ADM computing in Canterbury, literally just down the road from our school, but they'll goto pretty much anywhere in the Kent/Sussex area. Welcome to ADM Computing - Complete IT Solutions in Kent - Microsoft Certified Gold Partner Give Jason Bramley a call there if you're interested, and tell him Mike from Spires Academy recommended him. Mike

I have two APC 2200 UPS devices in my server rack. All my servers have duel power supplies, so I have one PSU powered from each UPS. That way if one of my UPS devices goes down, everything carries on working. (apart from possibly the KVM as that's powered from just one of them) They are at about 50% capacity, giving a run time of about 10 minutes. My servers are set to shut down after just 2 minutes of power outage anyway, as if the power is out in the server room then it's more than likely out elsewhere in the building, meaning it's pretty pointless left running. It's all been tested as well, as we had a power issue over christmas, the system e-mailed me as it should do notifying me it was running on battery power, and all the servers shut down flawlessly. It all came back on again correctly when the power was restored as well - I was pretty pleased! Mike.

We always get a company in to do our data points. They charge by the day and not per point, so it costs as long as they think it's going to take. They're very efficient, I've had them do quite a lot of work in the 8 months I've been at the school, jobs that would have taken me weeks are completed by them in a few days to a good standard, and the best bit is that all the work is tested and guarunteed for 15 years by the company, so any problems they come back and fix it! They also give me a copy of the teste data for my records. Mike

Do you buy directly from sun, or do you use a reseller? If so, would you mind sharing? I've always brought HP servers, but if you really can buy one get one free, then suddenly sun are looking more attractive and I'm going to do some research I think!

Register the schools phone number with the Telephone Preference Service, and you will find you'll get less cold calls. However a lot of them tend to be in response to people filling in forms for information and not ticking those 'do not contact me' boxes. With so many staff at a school, it's hardly surprising schools end up on lots of lists. We buy from local companies, even if they're not the cheapest, as part of the ethos of the academy is supporting the local community. I use a local company for my cabling, and we have a local company we use for our stationary and toner supplies. The great thing about local comapnies is sometimes they can deliver the same day, can't get better than that! Mike.

Get some helpdesk software, it's an invaluable tool to help you manage you workload. I can recommend myLittleHelpdesk (Written and developed by a member on here, can't remember who thou!) On-demand Help desk, Customer Support & Service SaaS from OP Software - My Little Helpdesk (Mind you I have just noticed the cost has risen a bit) Mike.

Funny, that's precisely the direction we're heading in, we currently have CC3 as well. I just need to 'fully justify' the extra expense for that solution over the cheaper quotes we've received for a 'traditional' network setup. I don't think I'll have much trouble doing so thou. I would do it all in house, but time is a bit on the short side this summer. Mike.

If you want to setup a system that you're going to use repeatedly, use Fog, it really is quite brilliant. If you just want to use it the once, then use PING (partimage is not ghost) and boot it from a USB stick with enough space for the image, then it's nice a simple! If you're moving the image to a different machine, you'll probably also want to read about and use sysprep How to use the Sysprep tool to automate successful deployment of Windows XP Mind you, reading yourr question again, you say you want to 'put it on a new fresh copy of windows' which these imaging systems won't do, they take an image of the entire disc, faults and all. If you're wanting to do this because the current system is running in-adequately, this won't solve your problems, it is merely a way of cloning an entire system. The only way to solve that sort of problem is to re-build the machine from scratch, or find out what is wrong with it and fix it, then take an image of it. That way should it go wrong again in the future, you can copy that image back on and you're back where you started when it all worked. Hope that helps, Mike.

Are all these machines in one area of the school? It could it be a network related issue if this is the case? Deploying sophos, GPO's applying and Internet explorer all things that require a good network connection. This behaviour sounds very like some form of malware/spyware behaviour to me. IE never puts up popups as standard, suggests to me that there's a deeper undelying issue other than the actual brand of the machines. Personally, I have 36 stone all in one computers, and I love them - they work flawlessly and stones service is outstanding. Mike.

I think that replacing them would come and bite you on the a**e in about 3-4 years time when the hardware starts to get old and out of warraty and you start having to try and repair them yourself as stuff goes wrong. PC's, no problem replacing stuff plenty of off the shelf spares that will fit more makes and modesl. Macs - have you ever looked at the price of spares? Mike.

Maybe, just maybe, it happened that the Microsoft solution happened to fufil the project criteria?? I'm far from an advocate for Microsoft, but then on the other hand I think discounting them purely because it costs a lot is the wrong approch to take. Sharepoint has a lot going for it, and while I may disagree with the sometimes excessive licensing fees Micosoft charge, products like sharepoint are in my opinion worth the expense. Also with the amount of schools, colleges and other people involved in a project of this scale, it makes perfect sense to stick with what users and system administrators are familure with. Mike.

You can use for forms tool in Word to define areas of the document that can be written in, then lock the document so they can only write in those areas. Takes a long time to do properly thou for a big application form, but very effective when done correctly. Mike.

I have a VBS script which will modify this all in one go. (Offered with no warranty etc. I suggest you try it on a test OU first!) Const ADS_PROPERTY_APPEND = 2 Const strOU = "LDAP://OU=Year 11,OU=Students,OU=MON,OU=Establishments,DC=montgomery,DC=internal" Const strGroup1 = "CN=Teaching Staff E-Mail,OU=Network Operational Groups,OU=Groups,OU=Not On RM,OU=Establishments,DC=montgomery,DC=internal" Set objOU = GetObject(strOU) objOU.Filter = Array("user") For Each objUser In objOU 'wscript.Echo objUser.Name objUser.PutEx ADS_PROPERTY_APPEND, "dLMemSubmitPerms", _ Array(strGroup1) objUser.SetInfo Next To use it do the following; 1. Create a group that you WANT to be able to e-mail students, in this case we called it Teaching Staff E-mail, because we want teachers to be able to e-mail students, but no one else. 2. Program the LDAP string of the container with the users in you want to apply this setting to. You might need to us LDAP browser from softerra to get the correct string, unless you're good at writing them yourself. 3. Run the script. This will add the group teaching staff e-mail into the delivery restrictions for every account in the specified OU so that the students can only receive mail from the members of that group. Mike. EDIT: Note, this method also stops them receiving mail from outside the organisation as well. We don't allow this at the moment, so this method works for us! I think there's probably an addition to the script that can change the radial button too, so you can do it the other way round - 'receive from everyone except'

Cheers for that comparison grumbledook, I'll store that one up for when they tell me I've run out of money by over spending on maintenance for my 5 yr old Dell workstations that are dropping like flies at the moment!

The best 2 factor authentication system I've come across was where the mobile number of the individual was registered in the software, then when the user authenticated with their username and password it dispatches a text message to said mobile with a pin code, which is then duely entered into the box provided. Not sure if it fufills all the requirements, but it's a damn good idea! Problem is I can't remember where I read about it now! Mike.

I hate this problem, it's a PITA. I wish RM would produce a fix for it! I get at least 1 support call a week about this, and I've given up resetting profiles now, I just tell them to go via my computer, and N:\ Mike.

We don't ban here unless it's a very serious offence that may compromise the network. We have only banned 1 student from using the internet since september, and 4 students received a total network ban for 4 weeks for attempted keylogging of passwords. In my opinion bans are counter productive, and stem from the days of old where access to ICT equipment was a priveldge and most schools only had 2 ICT suites or simelar, and maybe students only got 1 hour of ICT a week. We are a long way from that now, we have laptop PCs in every department in this school, and they form a vital part of the curriculum in most subjects. Computer access is seen as essential at all times for all students, hence this approach. I think banning students is doing them an injustice and prevents them from working effectively in most subject areas these days in this school. Mike.