maniac

Yes the progress bar did move, but it had only got to about half way after 20mins, and I wasn't prepared to wait much longer as it's quicker to shut them down using RM if it's going to take that long. There could be a large number of workstations in our package control that no longer exist, my AD is littered with them as our CC3 network is very old and has seen many many different network managers in its time. Maybe if I spend a little time tidying I might have more success! Thanks Mike.

Several people expressed an interest in this, so I hope it's OK to release it here. Easy Password Reset is a small .NET utility written by me that allows anyone to easily reset student passwords (Providing they have the correct permissions in your AD schema of course) I have tested it on 2 different networks, and it works well on both of them, so hopefully it will also work for others. What does it do? Allows staff to easily reset student passwords with a few clicks of the mouse, no difficult interface or risk of them being able to reset staff users passwords or simelar. What do I need to run it? The program requires .NET 2.0 to run, and correct permissions on AD to allow the person using it to change passwords. How do I install it I've provided just the .EXE file in a ZIP file below. Unzip to a suitable location and run. It will not run from a network drive, but that's a limitation of .NET and not the program. I think there is a hack somewhere to allow .NET programs to run from network shares, but I've never looked that deeply into it. How does it work? The program automatically binds to your AD using LDAP to retrieve a list of users, no settings to program in as it finds them all out at runtime. It filters the users based on the 'standard' prefix of year of entry so it will pick up any users beginning with 08,07,06,05,04,03 and 02 covering all year groups from Year 7 to Year 13. (I will do a primary version if anyone asks as it's pretty easy to modify the code for that.) It doesn't matter what AD containers your users are in, the program searches the whole directory quickly and displays a list for the year group you select from the front screen. You simply select a user, and click reset password. The password is reset by default to 'password1' but there is a text box where you can choose a different one if you want to. Also by default the option for 'change password at next logon' is set as well. (I will write a feature into the program to select this at runtime if people would like it, but for now it does it to all password resets as that's what we do in our school, and it's good practise anyway.) Using this utility there's no danger of staff being able to reset passwords they shouldn't unless you have other users with the above prefixes. What if I use a different username pattern? Then this utility isn't for you. I wrote it for my school where we do use that pattern, and most other schools I have come across also do, so it should serve most peoples needs. What about next year when the year groups move up a year, will I need to update it? No you won't as the program calculates the year group prefixes depending on the date. It rolls over on the 1st September automatically. I hope some of you find it useful, and any questions please feel free to ask. I have been sucessfully using it in my school for a while now, and in a previous school for over a year. The program is released without any sort of warrenty, if you can't get it to work I can only offer limited support for it as it was a personal project that I thought others may find useful. Many thanks, Mike.

I tried this today running it from one of my CC3 servers, and it just hung for over 20 mins searching for stations. I know some were switched on and our network may not be perfect, but it's not that slow. Is there anything that may be causing that behaviour that I can remedy? Mike.

That's what I do for most devices that want a static IP as it also means you can easily keep track of available addresses, and change the IP number if you ever want to without having to visit the printer, although i know you can do this in the web console of most printers these days anyway, but nice to have it all in one place. Mike.

Now that's always a pleasant letter to receive, nice one Mike.

The clue is in the name, Diploma In Digital Applications = video, website design and making power point presentations. The old style equivalent was called Information Systems when I went through the education system, and focussed on databases, word processing and designing logos. It was only when I progressed to 'A' level where we started learning programming and how a computer actually worked, but that's not really taught properly even at 'A' level these days. Any how I digress, Welcome aboard Robbo123 and others above who've recently joined. Mike.

Does anyone know of a UK Importer of this product. http://www.pc-security.com/PDF/BatteryChargerFlyer.pdf Yes they're expensive, but because we have over 400 dell laptops that all take the same sort of batteries, we are seriously considering buying one and a stock of spare batteries to keep all our laptops going, provide spare fully charged batteries, and fully cycle dead batteries to bring them back to life where possible. Problem is I can't find a UK importer and the school are un-sure about letting me order it from the US. Any one else got something simelar? After extensive googling, they seem to be the only company that make them. Mike.

I setup laptops using windows offline files for the staff members home drive, syncronising at logon and logoff. It works fairly well unless the teacher has a lot of files in which case syncronising can take a while. I'm looking for a good alturnative to the standard windows offline files thou, as it's clunky and un-reliable, but I like it because it does give the best of both worlds, access to their files at home, but the files are backed up to the network for fail safe purposes. Initially when I started at my current school, staff had laptops with network access but a local my documents folder, and the technicians would back up each laptop once a term, which I think was a tremendous waste of time, hence the offline files solution. I really don't like the idea of teachers saving work locally only, as we all know it's only a matter of time until the hard drive fails and it's all lost, or the teacher drops the laptop or it gets stolen, and we also know who would get the blame. Offline files works a lot better with Vista by the way, as it does most of it in the background. Shame the OS itself isn't such a resouce hog, or I would consider it for staff laptops. Mike.

You should be able to achieve this using regini.exe How to Use Regini.exe to Set Permissions on Registry Keys How to change registry values or permissions from a command line or a script I think you can call this from machine startup script by sticking the exe on the netlogon share, or using the -m option you can do the changes remotely. I've never tried it, but the MS knowledgebase articles should help you use it. Incidently those articles refer to windows 2000 and NT4, I've no idea if the same tool is included or will work with XP/server 2003 but it's the best I can find for what you want to do. Mike.

Get yourself a few copies of some of the games in the Myst series, they are the biggest selling video games of all time after all, and only £4.99 a copy. Fair enough it's not going to push your machines to their limits, but there are hours of fun to be had looking round the MYST worlds, and amazingly even though no one gets killed, and the game play is quite sedate, the kids love it as it's a bit different to the general type of games being rolled out these days. Tim Rylands even won a BECTA award for it's use in teaching literacy, so in that sense it's almost approved by BECTA! Mike.

From memory I can't remember, but it's somewhere under computer configuration. I would use GPMC on your server to look at your GPO's to see if this setting is applied; it quite often is as it means GPO changes get applied immediatly which is always handy. Turning it off for our laptops cerainly made a difference to logon times. Mike.

Just out of interest, how many GPO's do you have applying to the laptops, as I found it was the number of GPO's and their complexity that was slowing down laptop logons for me. We also had the 'always wait for network at startup and logon' option switched on which slowed things down as the laptops would re-copy all the GPOs from the server everytime someone logged on. I find laptops work better without this option, as they will use the cached versions stored on them, which should be OK unless you've made changes in which case it can sometimes take 2 or 3 restarts for new GPO's to apply, but they will eventually. Mike.

Depends on the age of them, and whether they are still eligigable for upgrades or not. A Windows 98 license entitles you to use XP upgrade editions for instance. Anything really old could probably be disposed of (Shredding them is best) but I take a PDF scan of any documents before I dispose of them, and archive them on 2 CD copies just incase; in many cases it's the information on the documents and not the documents themselves that are important. Mike.

I remember being taught using that system, as in I was still at school! They scrapped it the year I left, which was 1999! Can't help you I'm afraid, but brought back memories hearing that product mentioned!

3 com network supervisor is free to use, initially you get a 60 day trial, but register it for FREE and you get an unlocking key to allow you to keep using it, at least I think they still do this for free anyway, they certainly used to. If you have managed switches it will tell you all sorts of information on them and produces a very accurate network map. Mike.

I presume that's a group of volunteer staff? Do any schools consult students at all about their perceptions of ICT, and what they might like to see. OK, I know a lot of it would be rubbish, but ocassionally they have been known to come up with a gem of an idea. Mike.

When I started at the school I'm at now 12 weeks ago as NM, the 2 existing technicians were of the same opinion as yourself, that deliveries were handled by the site team, and not them. However I can't see any logical reason for this unless the item in question needs special handling etc. so they were quite surprised when I asked them to collect some boxes from reception in my second week there, so I talked them through my philosophy which is. Just get on and do it. It's easier and a lot less hassle to do it yourself, the time you spend trying to track down the site guys, and then time you waste chasing them and arguing about it, you could have probably moved the delivery 5 times yourself. You also get to see the goods in yourself so you know what was delivered, and if anything is missing and get them moved to your preferd place of storage in the correct way insted of just dumped in your office or store room. ICT departments do generate a lot of deliveries, and the site team in most schools have enough to do as it is so are usually very grateful for you taking responsibilities for your own deliveries. You also win a few favours, so when you need some benching put up or something heavy moved that you can't do yourself, they are usually more willing to help you, at least in my experience wanyway. As a side note, you'll find most contracts have the clause 'and any other reasonable tasks as instructed by the head teacher or line manager' or something simelar in. Given the job role and the amount of deliveries ICT deprtments tend to get, I'd say that it's not un-reasonable for us to be moving boxes. Mike.

I have real problems with the HP2015 printers. 1 of them keeps resetting its self to factory settings, they constantly drop off the network and require switching off and on for the server to recognise them again, a minor annoyance but none of my other printers do this. I also have a driver issue with the PCL5e driver which crashes the print spooler on the local machine when you add the printer from the network. This has only started recently, and HP have not managed to solve it yet (although to give them credit they have tried very hard) It's possible these problems could be down to other issues on my network, but I've also had problems with HP2015 printers in a previous school. However, they are excellent value for money, and the print engine on them is very reliable, and nice and quick and good quality, just a shame the networking and drivers don't seem to be as reliable for us. I've started buying the next model up, the HP 3005n, which in theory should have a lower TCO as the price per page is a lot lower, although the printer its self costs a little more at about £350 each. Mike.

Thanks for that. I'm currently looking for a decent company to quote me for a screen and projector installation in our school hall, so I'll give them a call. Mike.

I'll stick it up soon then. I just need to de-brand it as it's customised for our school at the moment with our logo in it etc.

I've written a simple password changing program which allows teachers to reset student passwords with a couple of clicks of the mouse. Requires .NET 3.5 to run thou as it was done in visual basic express 2008. I will share it if people are interested.

When I used to manage a Bromcom wireless system (You know the one with the clicking relays in each transmitter) every time we had a storm some of them would be knocked out. It seemed even a strike than was not that near to the school fryed the controller chips in them, damned things! Best option as already stated is to only have fibre cables for distribution round the building, then only a direct hit on or very close to the server room would probably damage the equipment, and in those circumstances you could have as much surge protection as you want in place and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference as the static in the air would probably be enough to do some damage. The APC solution already posted is by far the neatest unit I've come across on the market for these types of devices. Mike.

I've just set up a basic staff intranet using wordpress, as it's dead simple! Because it's basically a blogging application, it's really easy for admin people to go in, type a new article and submit it, no complecations there at all. It also has shortcuts to our ICT helpdesk, school website, webmail, Eclipse library system and google so it's a good starting point for staff. Students at the moment just get a crude HTML page with shortcuts on to the different systems. It doesn't look that impressive, it could be better if I had more time to spend on it, but it's really only a stop gap until we get our full VLE in place which will hopefully be sharepoint based, and take over as the starting page for all. Mike.

This is not about performance management, as that focusses mainly on individuals. It's about evaluating the whole ICT support department and the level of support you offer to the school, how its delivered and how staff perceive you in the school with the aim to improve some or all of these, identify problem areas and be able to show improvement as some sort of figure(s) on a piece of paper (we all know head teachers love statistics!) If you do, how do you do it? On-line surveys, E-mail surveys, questionnares, comments and suggestions box or any/all of the above? Or maybe something totally different. How often do you do it? Or maybe you see this sort of thing as a pointless exercise that will just invite people to make pointless criticisms and achieve very little in the process. Any input welcome! Mike.

Our almost brand new server that was supplied by RM around April, just before I started as NM definitely does not have a sticker. I'm very un-impressed by that server in general as it's not a rack server, but has had rack rails crudely screwed on the side and the chassis is very cheaply built. Saying that, it does work ok and the spec is OK. Why do RM make the C:\ partition so tiny so when I get a large stack of print jobs stuck in a queue my disk fills up and I'm also annoyed that you can't team the network cards on any of our RM servers, as they all have two different makes of network card on board, why?? Some things about the way RM configure their servers just does't make sense! Mike.