maniac

Try booting it into safemode, I'm pretty sure the UPS service won't be running while in safemode, so it won't do anything. You should then be able to re-configure the settings. Mike.

Saw that on the local news yesterday, lots of teachers from my last school live in that area St marys island isn't even a proper island, although technically it qualifies, but it's only about 10ft from main land! One thing that article doesn't mention is who the snake belongs to; Missing snake belongs to X-factor star | KentOnline| News Mike.

For the second one, try a different GBIC module just incase you have a faulty one, I had one in a batch I ordered once, HP sent me a new one no questions asked and didn't even ask for the old one back! Also check your patch leads, if you've ordered new ones you havn't accidently got the wrong size fibre have you? I did this myself and they worked fine on the links with a good strong signal, but on longer runs where the signal has dropped a bit, the loss from the incorrect fibre size in the patch lead caused it not to work. Took me hours of head scratching to work out what was wrong! At the time I didn't know there were 2 different sizes of fibre. 62.5/125 is the most common and is what our fixed fibre cables were, but with lack of knowledge I ordered the cheapest patch leads from my supplier which just happened to be 50/125. I didn't realise there were different sizes of fibre until I encountered the problem, and started doing some googling! Mike. Edit:- just re-read and realised you tested the fibre module, so ignore the first part of my post! Note to self: Should learn to read properly before posting!

I'm not sure if you can deploy Ultra VNC via an MSI, but if you can, changing this registry entry hides the tray icon for that VNC program. Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3] "DisableTrayIcon"=dword:00000001 Mike

Taken from this document, I don't know what year this was publuished however! Mike.

I live in a shared house, so on our network we have 3 newish PC's 3 Laptops 1 x NDAS 160GB network hard drive 1 x PS3 1 x X-Box 360 1 x Old PC running Server 2003 All connected through a Virgin Media 10mbs net connection via an old Buffalo router and an old 16 port switch in the back room. Cabling that lot was interesting as it's a rental house, I can't go drilling holes in the walls and putting in proper fixed cabling, so it's all neatly clipped round the bottom of the skirting boards and run under doors. Luckily it's an old Victorian house none of the doors fit properly so they still close! When I lived at home, I managed to network my PC with one of my friends who lived in the next road, but whose garden almost backed onto mine. We clipped a long BNC cable to the top of the fence, it went through two neighbours gardens without them even knowing! It worked a treat and we could play games against each other from our own houses, chat to each other and transfer files to each other. This was long before broadband internet, so was quite amazing back then! Mike.

PS2 Powered webcam, I found one of those in a previous school, it was still new and boxed! Also in the same school found 2 old handheld B/W scanners complete with MCA cards they were new and boxed as well. By the way, NTP on the back of that radio receiver box probably stands for 'Network Termination Point' as oppose to 'Network Time Protocol' so it's probably some sort of radio link to a remote network of some sort, possibly a weather satellite or simelar; a lot of schools got given weather satellite receiving kit in the 1990's. It could be something else, but this would be my best guess. mike.

I've just found a BNC repeater still connected to the old BNC loop in a room here. Although it wasn't actively in use, it was still switched on! Wonder when the last time data flowed through it was? So just for fun, what old kit do you have floating around in your place, and what's the oldest piece of kit you still have in use? Mike.

I've been in there re-arranging the furniture! We now have a nice comfy sofa, and a TV in the corner!

I use StatCounter Free invisible Web tracker, Hit counter and Web stats and there's a handy joomla add-on somewhere to allow you to have the counter displayed in it's own module. (I can't find it on the joomla extensions site now, but I've got a copy if you want to use it.) It's clever too for a free counter, but limited to statistics on only the last 500 hits for the free version. It provides better data than any counter in joomla itself. Mike.

Apologies for not updating the thread, but I'm afraid they've all gone now!! Uptake was lightning quick from local schools, and most of them were collected today! Thanks for your interest everyone, managed to clear a lot of space in my store room Mike.

Kent have EIS who are part of the LA but are effectively a seperate organisation with their own offices etc. EIS - Supporting ICT in Schools Mike.

I know it's not I.T related, so apologies if it's not allowed. Due to one of our friends pulling out, I have a spare weekend ticket to the Reading Festival which takes place 22nd-24th August 2008 in Reading (of course!) check out Reading Festival 2008 :: HOME for all the information. I'm asking face value for the ticket, that's £160 (which includes the booking fee I paid) and I would prefer it if someone could collect the ticket, as See Tickets don't send them out until a few days before the festival, so it makes it a bit tight with posting it onto anyone! Thought I'd offer it here first. If no one would like it, then it's onto flea-bay with it I'm afraid! PM me if interested. Mike.

Depends how many you want, I've got some that are boxed up in 10's I think, but a majority of them are loose or individually boxed, hence the reason I would prefer collection. I'm not precisely sure how many of each as I've not had a detailed count up yet! I've PM'd you anyway. @contink You also have a PM Mike.

Having just discovered yet another store room full of ICT equipment (Only been here 5 weeks!) I've come to the conclusion we need to shed some of our 4 tons of laptop bags. I can only presume every laptop that's ever been brought was supplied with a free bag, as we have way more than we could ever possibly use, and they are taking up an infeasibly large amount of storage space. They are all Dell and are all new and un-used. I've got about 100+ to dispose of. I hate waste, but if I can't find homes for them then they will just end up in the skip, as we really need the space back! Collection only please, and if you do want some they must be collected by the 20th August as I'm off on holdays then, and I want to clear out my storerooms by the time I go! I'm located in Canterbury, Kent. Many thanks, Mike.

Still it's a pretty 'ewe'nique thread you can't deny that! I suppose the sheep has a new fleece on life now . . . .

couple of tips from me when deploying it on your network; Install the ADM policy files into active directory so you can control the packages. Using the group policy, Set the default save format to the 2003 compatible formats for all programs. Seems a pain really not to take advantage of the new file formats which are much more efficient, but a majority of places schools are likely to send file to probably still use office 2003 and previous, so it saves a LOT of headaches. Ensure any programs you've got that compile reports into word are compatible with office 2007. I think all the main MIS systems are now, but we had a finance system that needed an upgrade to work properly, and that caught us out! Disable all add-ons in outlook, they caused a lot of problems for us with outlook running slow. Also disable word as the default e-mail editor, it makes life a lot easier in my experience. From a staff point of view the tasks that caused us the most problems were clipart, it wouldn't search properly through our proxy, and people locating the file menu! Mike. EDIT: @somabc didn't intentionally repeat your information, you posted while I was typing the reply!

When I first saw the article, I was convinced someone was trying to pull the wool over our eyes. . . .

Ever thought of a career as a headline writer for the Sun??

Shouldn't that be; I knew ewe would say something like that. . .

The crunch time will come when a player like microsoft decide to dis-continue IPv4 support in their next release of windows or something like that. That's probably the only time that most people will seriously start considering changing. I fully expect the main backbones of the internet to be running IPv6 long before then (some probably do already) and probably a transition period where both will be offered to end consumers from ISPs but there will be a cut off time at some point, there has to be or things won't progress. I expect most internal networks, and probably most LEAs will continue to run IPv4 all the time their software and hardware supports it, only moving over when they absolutely have to. Mike.

I returned a printer to HP once for repair, was told to leave the toner and paper tray out of the printer. Repaired printer turned up a week or so later with a new paper tray and toner in it, so I got some free spares Mike.

has the other server still got the Global Catalogue role? If so, I'd be tempted to hand the other roles back to the old DC, and de-promote the new server then try from scratch again; but obviously only if your domain is still functioning correctly with the origenal DC. Just an idea, although I will add I've not had a lot of dealing with promoting and de-promoting servers so I've no idea if it would actually help. Mike.

As the MIS system is possibly the most vital system in a school these days (second only to the Domain controller) I'd go for good redundancy. Redundant PSU and duel NICs for redundancy (not speed.) For storage I'd opt for 4 drives setup in 2 x RAID 1 systems. That's a pair of drives for the OS and programs, and a second pair of drives to hold the SQL data. A Higher spec duel core CPU should be fine, and I'd go for 4GB of decent RAM as it's pretty affordable. Personally I'd build all this based on an HP DL380, as in my experience they are some of the most reliable servers I've ever had the fortune to work with, and they come with a whole host of good monitoring utilities so you can always be sure of being alerted early if there's a problem with your SIMS server. This won't be the cheapest, but it will be one of the better setups you could choose. Mike