maniac

I saw a workstation at my last school where the dust had formed a 'drift' against the ram because of the flow of air in the case. My home PC gets bad inside, on the floor of my bedroom probably the worst place for it, and it has a ton of fans so moves a fair amount of air through it! They should recycle used PCs as air filters, as they seem to trap everything inside them. Mike.

Damn you, got to level 9 and got confused! Mike

If you look at it from the point of efficientcy then you can't argue much with the fact for those who are willing, and have the skills to use and the means to access easily the necessary software to manage their diary electronically, then providing everyone is managing their diary the same way then yes, it is undoubtably a more efficient process. In your first post you asked why do schools insist on buying all these bits of paper, and I think it all boils down to old habits die hard. Paper based diaries will always be used by some, I use one myself and suppliment it with an electronic one to utilise reminders in case somethings slipped my mind from reading the diary that morning. With the given example of arranging a meeting, I think as long as the system works and the meeting gets arranged then all's good. Yes it takes longer to get an answer, but it's not like you're actually using 3 hours of time to arrange a meeting, it probably only take a few minutes of physical time to perform the actions to arrange the meeting, (like send an e-mail, ring them on the phone or pop and see them quickly) you're just waiting 3 hours for a confirmed response. If the meeting is arranged say for a few days time anyway, then waiting a few hours for a response is no real problem in my opinion. Anyway, that's my take on it all. I shall now bow out of this thread. Mike.

Sometimes on older machines it picks up USB memory sticks as hard drives, so if you look at your boot device order, you might find the memory stick listed as a hard drive. (Obviously turn the machine on with the memory stick inserted first) Simply place this ahead of your main HDD in the boot order, and it should boot from it fine. I have a lot of very old HP TC1100 tablets that I boot from USB like this. Mike.

I think gigabit to desktop should be standard in any new network, as pretty soon we're going to have 10Gbs links to servers as standard, and the whole thing will shift up a gear like it did with the wide spread introduction of Gb links years ago. With more wide spread useage of video and multimedia content and storage being rediculously cheap meaning everything can be stored on the network storage with no problems, gigabit to desktop is going to be a necessity pretty soon. Why or earth would anyone suggest changing it to a slower speed? Unless it's a plan on the drawing board, and they're trying to save cash? Even then, the cost difference is a fraction of what is used to be, gigabit switches are very affordable now, and most workstations come with gigabit NICs as standard these days anyway. Mike.

At the end of the day it's personal preference, some people prefer paper diaries, some people prefer electronic ones. At my school they give you the choise, if you want a paper diary then you can request one from the office manager, if you don't then you don't have to, but no one is forced to organise themselves in a certain way just because someone else thinks it is a good idea. If we said everyone must use outlook calendars, they'd be major backlash from staff, and for good reason as just because I find it more convenient because I have the skills to use the technology, and the means to access it whenever and wherever I want, I have to remember not everyone does, and not everyone wants to learn these skills. As an example our site manager who is well into his 'senior years' doesn't even use e-mail, traditional notes in his pigeon hole are his prefered method of communication, but I tell you now he's one of the best organised people in the school because his system works for him. Personally, I use both. I have an outlook calendar, and I have a paper based diary, as each one works better in certain situations. Mike.

It's one of the problems I ran into when I tried this in my last school, all the staff came in on the Monday after I made the change and logged on as usual, and the network ground to a near hault as the new policy applied, and all the files were moved from the profiles to the user areas. Luckily, of course, it only does this once! Some of our teacher profiles were rediculous, I think the final straw was when I discovered one teacher with around 10GB of data on his desktop! The other thing that can cause problems that I didn't mention above is if you use a quota system, it can pay dividends to turn it off while users data is being copied from profiles to user areas, as if it runs out of space while it's moving the files, it can cuase all sorts of problems. You can turn it on again afterwards, and address the issues of staff who are using too much space then. Thanks for the thanks! I will see what I can do about an illustrated version. Mike.

OK, here are the basics. I was going to do something with screen pics in, but I'm too knackered to write that tonight. If there's sufficient interest, I'll put together a better guide for the wiki. Firstly Create a new Group policy. You could put the settings in an existing one, but I usually use seperate policies for key settings like this. it's a personal preference kinda thing. This is a User policy, and must be applied to the container where the users reside that you want to re-direct folders for. My personal recomendation if you are making this change is to create a new OU and apply the new policy to this, then move you users slowly a few each day say, else your network can get stressed when lots of people log on at the sametime, and lots of files start to get copied, particulalry if you have masses of files on desktops. You will probably get problems with some users in my experience, particularly if the user is wireless and the connection drops halfway through logging on, or the user gets impatient. It works most of the time, but ocassionally it will leave files behind in the profile which have to be move manually. It won't ever delete anything that's not been copied, so it's a fairly safe change. It may be worth warning your users that logons may be longer than expected as a one off, as sometimes it takes a very long time to copy the files, and to the un-trained user it can appear as if the logon has hung and they might be tempted to turn the machine off. The change is actually fairly simple, but there's a few key elements that can stop you having problems. There's 3 key areas you can re-direct. Application Data, Desktop and My Documents (You can do the start menu as well, but this is not worthwhile in my experience and may as well stay in the profile) So open up your new group policy in the editor, and find the area under user configuration-->Windows Settings-->Folder Redirection and you'll see the 4 elements described above listed. To apply the redirection, Right hand click the one you want to re-direct, and select properties, and you'll see the options you can set. I recommend the following settings, as they worked for me with no hitches. Target Tab Basic - Redirect everyones folder to the same location Redirect to the following location - enter the UNC path including %username% to signify the users home folder. e.g \\SERVER\SHARE\%username%\Application Data (Incidently this does only work if the persons home folder name is the same as their username, most networks are setup this way, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.) I thought it could work by refering to the local drive e.g. H:\ but it doesn't. Settings tab Exclusive Rights - Unticked (Can tick if you like, but can cause problems with administrator accessing folder for copying at a later date) As the folder is within the users home foler, the same security settings as the home folder will apply to it anyway. Move contents to new location - Ticked Leave folder in new location when policy is removed - Selected The Desktop folder and my documents can be re-directed using the same settings as above, but obviously changing the path accordingly. Desktop would be \\SERVER\SHARE\%username%\Desktop and my documents simply \\SERVER\SHARE\%username% I'm presuming your home folders are all contained in a root share, if they're individual shares, change the path accordingly. I may have over simplified this, but you did say an idiots guide Mike.

Give me a few minutes to just test it out in my Virtual network, and I'll post something up. It's cruical you tick the right boxes, else you could end up isolating people from their old desktops, which isn't good!

I would suspect that even if you manage to install the driver onto the machines remotely, you'll still have to log onto the machine as an admin level user with the USB device plugged in in order for it to actually install on the machine. USB devices are a pain like this, e.g scanners in ICT suites, if the student changes the USB port it's plugged into, the machine detects it as new hardware and even thou the drivers are there it still doesn't let them install it, which is good in one respect, but a pain in another. This also happens with the USB dongles for Cubase and the USB external sound boxes that the Music department have. Mike.

For anyone else struggling with LDAP type problems, I recommend downloading LDAP browser from softterra Softerra LDAP Administrator & Browser: Directory Management Tool Download it lets you browse your active directory using LDAP so you get the view and structure that LDAP programs will see, and the best bit is if you need an LDAP indetification string to address an object, you can copy and paste it out of the program directly into moodle or simelar. Saves a bit of time in writing them yourself and makes sure they're correct! Mike.

This is a common problem in schools, teachers for some reason fall in love with their desktops and store anything and everything there! Also if you have a quota system on your home drives, they pretty easily work out it's a way of circumnavigating them! As said above, folder re-direction is the way forwards, We re-directed Desktop to H:\desktop, my documents to H:\ and Application data to H:\userdata and it worked a treat. The folders are automatically created when the policy is applied, and if you tick the right box everything is copied over automatically when the user first logs on under the new policy (although it takes a while if the profile is big!) It speeded up logons no end for us, and also means all the important stuff is in one location, so less chance of losing data. Mike.

Seems like there is also shibboleth/active directory interoperability: From here: Windows Server 2003 R2 Partners and interesting project here: shibboleth-on-windows Apoligies for almost hijacking this thread, as none of the above really answers localzuk's origenal question, although I think it is relevant. Mike.

I think part of the problem in achieving single sign on in most schools is the in-flexibility of active directory itself. Now imagine if AD would let you 'validate' users from another source, say shibboleth for example. My old LEA used shibboleth for it's e-mail authentication, so every user in every school within that LEA has a valid account on its shibboleth server. It is also planning to use it for it's LEA wide VLE which is in the works at the moment. What would have been great is if my local AD server would also talk to the LEAs shibboleth server, and allow me to select accounts that I would like to allow onto my network. I could still assign them group memberships and manage the account locally within my AD environment, but shibboleth can provide the authentication method behind the scenes, which means the same username and password can then be used for everything! If they then moved schools within the LEA, I could de-valicate their account within my AD, and the next school can validate it on theirs. Also pupils that attend more than one school, 6th formers for example, could be validated at both schools. That way services that tie into AD like moodle and exchange can also use the same username and password. If all these different authentication services could actually talk to each other behind the scenes, then we'd be onto a winner! Mike.

No limits at the moment, but fast running out of storage space on my ageing servers, so I think some form of limiting may be looked at this summer, when I've actually had a chance to review how the server space is allocated at the moment. Why RM CC3 has to hide the shares in silly places, and duplicate everything to every server I don't know! Mike.

If you've ever watched the beginning of the film 21, this problem is the one described in the lecture that features near the beginning of the film, which got me intrigued enough to research it on the net. lol It's a very well know and well discussed problem, my father was even given this problem as part of his 'A' level maths course in the 60's, although it wasn't in the context of a game show. Mike.

My neighbour owes me a lot of bush then . . .

Yes, E-portal does offer LDAP single sign on support, but even though the boxes appear in the data controller program, it is a chargeable extra! When I last checked I believe they charged per user as well!! Mike.

Break up on 22nd for the kids, staff training day on 23rd. We're back on 1st September, kids are back on the 3rd. Got a tonne of things to do, and I'm sure we're not going to have enough time!

If you download the windows installer rather than the ZIP file package, it sets up IIS for you as part of the installation, and you can select what extensions you want at the same time. I found this the easiest way of getting PHP on IIS working properly. Mike.

The problem with having an individual share for each user is that it slows your network down a bit, as the entire share list is sent to each client machine every time a user maps a drive. (I think this is still the case in server 2003, it certainly used to be in server 2000.) Having more shares on a server also uses up more resources, which can also lead to other performance issues. It depends on the number of users you have however. The recommended way is to have a root share and use NTFS permissions to control access as is already done. The problem described is bantered about on many different forums too. You would have though Micro$oft would have fixed it by now! On my network we simply re-directed the my documents folder to point at H:\ If you had the option ticked in Group Policy to 're-direct to the users home folder' then this can cause a problems if the %homepath% variable is wrong (which is what causes this problem the first place) therefore we found it more reliable to refer to it by the drive letter. Mike.

My entire network of 1000 students and 200 staff was setup in the way I described, and had been running like that about 2 years by the time I left. We had no problems at all with Office, I'm sure we would have known if we did! Not sure about windows installer, as staff and students were never required to run it. Mike.

I've seen this problem, it is fairly common surprisingly! The most common fix is to turn on the policy 'always wait for network at computer startup/logon' although this can slow down your network a bit, but it does seem to solve this problem. I also found a good idea was to remove the users rights to the root folder, and only give the users rights to the necessaryfolder above it that they need. A lot of people don't believe this works, saying they need at least read only access to the folder(s) below it in the tree in order to access their home folder, but after testing it myself I can assure you this does work. e.g. If I had the local directory structure on my server of f:\students\2004\04smithjack and the folder f:\students was the shared root folder holding all the home areas, I would have directory security setup as follows: f:\students - Domain admins and system only f:\students\2004 - Domain admins and system only f:\students\2004\04smithjack - domain admins, system and 04smithjack Most setups I've come across have the 'all students' group or 'users' group set as read only on the two lower folders, but it isn't needed. The H:\ drive can still be mapped to \\server\students\2004\04smithjack with no problems, but if it tries to map h:\ to \\server\students then it won't let them as the user has no direct permissions to that folder. It also stops them using the 'up' button to get to your server root and network, which is handy! You can then use a VBS script or simelar to check for the existance of H:\ at logon and to re-instate the correct drive mapping where neccessary, as if it's gone to map it at logon and failed due to the user not having permissions on the root folder, there will be no drive now, so a simple VBS script can sort out the missing drive, and no one knows any different! Hope that's of help! Mike.

We're quite lucky, as we get our Websense server as part of our LEA deal. When I was looking at filtering options in my last job, the one that stood out was BLOXX Bloxx No Nonsense Web Filtering -- Products although I think it is also quite expensive. Mike.

You'll probably find an 'unknown device' in device manager, which if you remove, then re-run the printer setup should make it install properly. That's what normally happens in my experience, although some of the above do occur as well, depends on how much of the driver installed before it asked you to plug the printer in! Mike.