maniac

That's precisesly what I do. Even if you do delete something from AD you need, you can usually get it back because when you delete them they aren't actually deleted, they are merely tombstoned. There are several freeware tools out there to help recover deleted objects from AD, and they work as I've used them before when I accidently deleted about 30 active machine accounts on one ocassion Mike.

Sounds like a familure question, I had the same problem about a 2years ago. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/virtual-learning-platforms/6715-moving-moodle.html (ignore the title, it goes on to discuss having 2 different installations) After extensive reading, I discovered that keeping two different SQL databases and sets of files in sync was not a viable option, and the only workable solution was to have a single installation that is used both in and out of school. This was achieved for us by using reverse proxying in apache to serve moodle to the outside world via a server in our LEAs DMZ hosted for me by the LEA. I left that school last June, and it's still working now as far as I know, which is good! Mike.

I did have a plan in place, but then they decided they wanted to change the location of the main ICT areas in the school, and with it the entire ICT strategy as well so that went out the window! I'm now planning for that short term, as well as planning for renewing much of our network backend this year which has lacked any significant investement for a while now. Once we're on a level playing field again, I'm going to have another go at the longer term financial planning aspect. The problem I find is things are changing so quickly at the moment in the school I work in, it's almost impossible to make proper long term plans. There's also a lot of uncertainties, like we're supposed to be getting a complete new building at some point, but at the moment because of the financial situation of the LEA, that hangs in the balance and may or maynot actually happen. Things like that make it a nightmare to plan, and you almost need two versions of the plan to cope with that sort of situation. The other thing I find extreemly difficult is planning for equipment failures. For instance we've have had a massive number of our D510 laptops fail in the last 6 months, way more than I ever would have predicted. I think I planned for about 10% failure rate, we're actually nearer 25% failure rate on those particular machines. Therefore I've spent a significant amount more than was budgeted and that in turn throws everything else out. Mike.

For anyone interested, here's a technical analysis of how Conficker works and how it spreads. An Analysis of Conficker Mike

I hate to say it, but the older Dell laptops are prone to this. I've had no less than 14 D510 laptops die on me since September, all with the same fault as you're describing. The only fix seems to be a new motherboard at a cost of about £100 a unit. We are still fixing them in-house until the end of this year, then as they die they will be scrapped in our school. Mike.

I would have thought because of the type of information stored upon it, the SIMS server was the one that you would want as up-to-date as possible. Ours is patched relatively up-to-date. I don't think it's got the latest stuff on but it's not far off, and we have no problems at all. Mike.

I've just started using Stone computers, and brought 36 of their all in one PCs in December. So far so good, and the couple that we have had problems with were swiftly fixed by on-site engineer the next day. Very impressed so far, and I would recommend them. Mike.

Actually I've just round a solution to this. Using the REGSVR32 command to un-register the library twext.dll solves the problem, stops anything to do with previous versions appearing on the workstation, fantastic! Mike.

IE6, as IE7 does something screwy with our wallpaper As far as I know the students are normal CC3 users, although this network has been changed a lot over the 4-5 years it's been here, and nothing is documented so it's hard to tell as it's nothing like the way RM would have configured it I don't think. How do I tell if they are elevated users on CC3 or not?? Mike

We run RMCC3 here, and I can't seem to stop the students having access to the previous versions tab in Explorer. I've tried both the user and machine registry key additions from the microsoft support site, they work on a non CC3 machine, but on a CC3 machine there's something stopping them from working! I know the registry keys are applied, as I've remotely accessed the registry on my test machine and checked the key is present, and it is! Anyone got any ideas on preventing the students accessing this on RMCC3, as there's obviously something in CC3 over writing the registry change I've made. (In case you're wondering, they're having great fun restoring MP3 and SWF games at the moment that I keep deleting, I wondered how they were doing it so quickly! ) Cheers, Mike.

We are closely associated with another school, and it's likely that in the next few years the number of students and staff moving between the two schools will increase. The principal (who is the principal of both schools) has laid down the challenge to make the ICT systems co-operate more between the two sites so that students and staff can work at whichever site they need to without having to mess around too much. This includes colaboration with e-mail systems etc. as well to avoid having different addresses for people etc. At the moment both sites are totally seperate, and have everything they need on an individual basis. We are linked via the KCN network, which I think can be utilised with the help of Kent LEA to create a VPN link between the two schools if necessary, so that's the physical link sorted if we need to use it, but what's the best way to make two networks co-operate? To my mind there are a few ways. 1) Construct one domain with domain controllers at both schools kept in sync through the WAN link. Local storage at each school for that school students, and create OUs in active directory for both schools students and machines to allow them to be managed by a different set of policies. If it's done correctly, then a majority of the time all the resources will be served locally, it's only going to be when they logon on the other site that data will travel over the WAN. Potential problems: DNS/DHCP issues and the fact we run drastically different software at both sites. 2) Get both networks to trust each other through the WAN link. That way they could log onto either network from either site by selecting it in the domain drop down box. Potential problems: DNS/DHCP issues again and people not remembering to select the correct site from the drop down box. Also could be issues with dragging group policies over the WAN etc. 3) Something fancy with terminal services allowing machines to terminal service into the other site? No idea how this could work, but just an idea I had! 4) Keep seperate networks, and just use memory sticks etc. Obviously the easiest option, but causes the most problems with students having two accounts one for each school. There are other issues at play here, such as the learning platform, shared resources, finance system etc. which all need to work between the two schools. The finance system already does, we remote desktop into a machine at their end to use it, not ideal really but it works, but at the moment the other site has the microsoft learning gateway for its learning platform, we have just entered into a contract or Viglen Its Learning. Both sites run exchange for e-mail. The other site runs Ranger, we run RM at the moment, but that is set to change this August, but to what we don't know at the moment, because it really depends on how we decide to create colaboration between the two schools. The other issue at play is the other school in question is in a fully managed service contract at the moment, we are not a fully managed service and have no intentions of ending up as one. I think the contactor for the service contract will assist us with this, as they have been apointed by the school, and thus take the instructions from the school with terms to what they want to do with the ICT in the school. Has anyone got any suggestions for the best way of achieving what we've been asked, because at the moment I'm floudering in a decisionless wonderland and really don't know what to suggest to people as a way forwards! Many thanks for you help as usual! Mike.

Out of interest, which school do you work at (PM if necessary) because the meeting they had at this school, they also had people from other schools here looking at the product. Just wondering if yours was one of them as you're also in Kent. Mike.

Has anyone ever heard of Youth Bytes Desktop Communication System? Just found out our student support unit had a demonstation of this last week, although they ommited to invite me for whatever reason (well why would they I'm only responsible for the entire computer network ) I only found out today when a member of their staff e-mailed me forwarding on a copy of the presentation they were shown last week and saying their technical guy will be in contact soon to discuss the program with me Anyway, been trying to find out information on it all morning, and as their website is down for updating, I can't find much out at all. According to their presentation it's a desktop messaging program that runs on the student desktops allowing the school to put messages there, publicise events etc. with click thrus to relevant websites etc. Also according to their presentation the product is in use in just 21 schools which is a worryingly small number. Anyone shed any light on this product? Mike.

Our staff filtering is very relaxed. The only categories that are filtered for staff are Adult websites, Gambling, on-line games, proxy websites and instant messaging. There are several categories which have a warning which staff have to click before they can view the sites in that category, but most other things are available. However this is up for review soon, as facebook keeps appearing as a top 10 website for the whole school, which does beg questions as to exactly how many teachers are using it when they should be teaching. Mike.

From the sophos site . . That's how. Worrying yes, surprising no and I'm not really worried myself, as I take all precautions against this sort of thing. It doesn't really change anything except make people more aware of the issue, which is being done even more effectively now because of these news articles. Looks like mission accomplished to me, even if they may have broken the law to do it. Mike.

In my experience ADSL is quite sensitive to bad cabling, so option 2 would work, but would probably effect the speed if the cabling is as bad as you say it is. I presume you have a fibre link between this building and the main one, so is there a spare fibre channel you could use via a couple of 100MBs fibre converters (which are pretty cheap now) to take the signal from the router on a pysical seperate network to it's required location, thus cutting out having to configure VLANS on the switches etc. Mike.

Basically its buy food there or tinned meat like hot dogs and cold soup (BBQS are pain to cook on specially every meal. Doesn't surprise me, I fully expect reading festival and others to follow suit, the amount of idiots starting fires and throwing cannisters on is beyond a joke, so it was only a matter of time until they made a condition like this. Luckily I always budget a lot of cash for these weekends, and can't normally be bothered to cook, so I don't bring a stove, but plenty of people do and it will annoy some no doubt.

Booked my ticket the other day, just gotta hope my friends actually come thru and buy theirs now! This'll be the 3rd time I've done Download festival, I missed last year thou as I changed jobs at the same time the festival was on so I couldn't take the time off.

Thanks for that. Shame there's no thanks button on here. I can give you rep thou, I think.

I've been having major issues with speed for about 3 weeks now, and not really getting anywhere with their technical support who are basically blaming the phone line, although there's nothing actually wrong with the line according to BT, and phone calls are lovely and clear through it. For the first 2 months I was getting good performance of between 8-10mbs which is good considering I'm only paying for the Be Value package, but this suddenly dropped to around 1mbs about 2 weeks ago, and has sat there ever since. There was a total outage last weekend, which was fixed by Sunday afternoon, and I was hoping maybe this would resolve the speed issues as well, but it hasn't. My upload speed is fine, but download speed is depressingly slow. It's also very inconsistant, one second it will be 1.5mbs, the next it will be 0.5mbs on speedtest.net is averages to just under 1mbs. Damned annoying! Basically I'm after just one other person on be-unlimited who is connected to the Canterbury exchange who may be having the same problems, so I can then e-mail back their technical support with that information and get them to do something about it! It's a long shot I know, but gotta try somewhere! So anyone?? Cheers, Mike.

Deciding whether to have a lazy day and do nothing, or a productive day and do everything. I've got Tuesday-Friday off so it's no good starting big projects, and everything else is pretty much OK at the moment. Might go over to English and repair the few broken keyboards that we discovered on friday, once I've re-labelled all the laptops because kids can't resist peeling off labels on second thoughts, I might just finish this cuppa tea, although the site manager's got the radio on outside my office, and is singing every now and then. (He's serbian with a big gruff voice, so as you can imagine the outcome is not particularly pretty) Hmmm, holidays don't ya just love 'em. Mike.

The school I used to goto as a student used RM netLM from about 1993 until I left in 1999. About 80 386 and 486 computers all run by two servers, great big floor standing things they were. I remember when they upgraded one of them when I was in Year 11 to a pentium based server, and we got given the old 486 based machine to mess around with - 486 66MHz, 32MB ram (which was loads in those days)and a 300mb hard drive. That was in the days when they let students mess around with this stuff, we had a room at the back of the ICT room that we'd pretty much been given free reign of where we had set up our own windows 3.11 network using old RM AX admin workstations and various other kit that was lingering around. I remember the day when the school decided to chuck it all out, so I took it all home! I also remember writing a messaging/e-mail program in VB3 for that nework. Because the workstations were diskless there there was a share on the server that was used for temporary files which was read/write for everyone meaning I could stick a database on it. Most of the students at the school were using my program before the staff found it and disapproved, and I had to explain to the head of ICT how I'd written it as he had tried to write a simelar program himself some months previous and failed to get it to work. Mike.

I've been using yawcam with my birdbox cam, seems to work well for me. Yawcam - Yet Another Webcam Software Mike.

You should be able to find that Sanyo one I linked in the post above for around £1000, we paid just under this about 5 months ago I seem to recall. Mike.

How much have you got to spend? We have one of these in our hall; SANYO PROJECTOR It's a bit of a budget offering, but does the job nicely for us. I can recommend the higher end Sanyo projectors as well, had one of these in a previous school and it was excellent. Mike.