maniac

We used to just use the school logo, made sense to me as it's a school intranet.

You shouldn't have to, as long as you remove it from the clients before you un-install the server side applications. There's a user called rangerremove (I think) which will automatically remove the ranger client for you. Sure you can no problem, I'll have to dig the programs out when I get home however, as I've recently changed jobs to another school, so I don't have them to hand at work at the moment. Mike

Afraid not, most eligibility criteria in organisations like Microsoft and Cisco etc. have a getout clause included for Educational premises. E.g this is the blurb from microsoft. Mike.

If you've never built a DC from scratch before, I would suggest (if you've got time) trying it first in a virtual environment, means you can find out any gotchas first. You don't have to do the whole thing, but it gives you the chance to mess around with the important things like DHCP, DNS and practise restoring your Active Directory and group policies. That's what I would do anyway if I had the time of course!) Mike.

Sounds like a problem with your disk setup or RAID/SATA drivers on the server to me, the 0xF789EA94 error is quite often related to the disk system. As it's a brand new server, the manufacturer should be able to provide some support over the phone, most will happily help you get supported operating systems functioning on their hardware, particularly as it's occured right out the box. I'd suggest giving them a call, they will be able to provide more specific advice relating to the model of server you have. Mike.

Now that made me laugh. :D We used to get a lot of tickets 'computer frozen' to which we'd uniformly reply, 'please try working somewhere a little warmer' until one lady took us seriosuly. Mike.

I think it's an excellent idea, could include sections on recent developments on important issues like BSF as it's always tricky to track down the right information on this. Perhaps a 'case study' type article if someone's carried out an interesting/different/groundbreaking project and want's the share the details with other people. Maybe things like recommendations on good practise, useful information like links to relevant sections of the BECTA site, stuff like that. I'd more than happily write some contributions for it, I'm not too bad at writing articles (I hope!) mainly enjoy writing the 'how to' type articles as I did a lot of these for the intranet at my last place, but it depends on the sort of newsletter as to whether that sort of article is relevant. Mike.

Find out how many days a year you'll actually be working, then do the following sum. (Per Anum Wage / 261) x Number of days working. (261 because you don't factor in weekends normally) That'll give you the Gross wage for the position. (i.e before tax and NI payments etc) To work out your monthly wage, devide this figure by 12 as you still normally get paid in 12 equal monthly payments, even though there'll be some months where you'll have 2 weeks off, and some like August you probably won't work at all! Mike. Actually thinking about this, I'm not 100% sure I'm right now, but that's how I've always worked out Pro-Rata saleries!

If you have the 'n' model priters, then you can connect them to your wireless network using a device like this Buffalo Turbo G High Power Wireless Ethernet Conve - Misco.co.uk Essentially it acts like a wireless extension to your network, you can plug devices into it, and it uplinks to the nearest wireless access point. To the device and the network it appears as if the devices are connected to the network by a cable as they should be. Mike.

I can image a 2GB partition using PING in about 2 mins when the stations are gigabit linked. At 100MBS it takes about 6 mins for 2GB, which I think is quick. This is to a linux file share on ubuntu, as apparently it's a lot faster using a linux file share than a windows file share. Mike.

Check nothing is already running on port 80, that's pretty much the most common problem with WAMP installations. Mike.

Unfortunitely not, it is very basic just allowing for the imaging of complete partitions, but it works as well as ghost/WDS/RIS in my opinion and is much easier to setup than WDS/RIS can be as it only requires a windows file share to store the images on, no server side programs at all to support it so for a basic imaging system, it works very well. Mike.

They're a hoax put out by cardosystems (see here - Only in the Movies) to try and sell their bluetooth headsets. A very clever hoax thou, I'll give them that. Mike.

Funny you should mention FOG, I was just reading about it on another site. lol It does look good, but is it as easy to set up as it appears, and will it run on an older server? The only spare server I have that I could use for it is about 4 years old. Mike.

As mentioned above, this may be linked to the fact you're running the script as a Startup Script and not a logon script. This ocassionally happens on most networks in my experience, but the drives status normally changes to on-line as soon as you browse it. Try running the script as a logon script, or even disconnecting the drives while logged on as a user, then running the script manually and see if you get the same results. Mike.

I looked at the system rescue CD (I have used this before) and also RIP linux which is another simelar linux build http://ftp.leg.uct.ac.za/pub/linux/rip/ I then found PING accidently, mainly because I wasn't having much luck with getting network cards working under RIP linux or the SystemRescueCD, and had no luck at all at getting the PartImage client to talk to the Partimage Server application, so I looked at a way of getting it to read from a network share, and PING popped up in my google search. The things that impressed me with this is it's menu driven, no need to issue commands to the linux shell directly (although you can if you want to) and it boots amazingly fast as the Linux build is only 20MB. I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to linux, so it was nice to find something that didn't need much messing around to get working. Mike.

Just a quick link to this Very handy Linux utility that I've just implemented in school I started work at this week, as they had no way of imaging workstations (They rebuilt them all from scratch when they went wrong, very time consuming!) PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost) It uses the partimage program, which I know a few people use, but it is packaged up nicely with a linux build that will boot very quickly from a USB stick or CD-ROM (or PXE boot if you've got time to set it up) and will link to a windows or linux file share for storing or retrieving the images from. It has an easy to follow menu driven system to create or retrieve an image, so minimal input needed fro the user. It also recognises most network cards with no problems, so no need to have to find and load network drivers like you might have to for WDS or ghost. It works very well so I thought I'd share it with you all. Only took me an afternoon to get it working properly. Worth reading to documentation as it also tells you how you can program some information in e.g the IP address of the server your storing the images on so you only have to respond to a few prompts to image each machine. Apologies if it's already been mentioned somewhere, I did do a search first! Hope someone finds it useful. Mike.

Thanks for that Friez, saves me looking as I'm currently re-coding my PHP helpdesk to use LDAP. Mike.

I've also had a demo of this system, and was very impressed by it, particulalry when he demod it using a VOIP handset walking around the room we were in, and you could actually see on the screen which 'transmitter' it was talking to and how it roamed between them with no drop out, very impressive. I would also like to hear anyone's opinions, as it's very likely I'll be specing out a brand new building soon and this is the wireless system I am seriously considering if it actually works on a large scale. Also if any school in the south east area has it in place I'd really like to see it in action. Mike.

Was he actually using his account or a mates?? I know kids quite often 'trade' logins at many schools I've worked in, and there's not a lot you can do about that except a disipline route. Mike.

Is that what they actually said on the phone, 'we don't have the time for CC3, but if it's CC4 then we do' That's poor customer service to say the least! Just because they no longer sell the product doesn't mean they should ignore customers who currently use it! That response from a company would really annoy me. Mike.

5 machines setup as domain controllers is a bit OTT, particularly when your network is not that huge compared to some. We only had 2 DCs at my last place, these were dedicated DCs that was their only role, and they served about 650 workstations. The new school I work at has 4 of its machines setup as DCs, which seems a bit OTT, but it's running RM CC3 which I don't want to upset, so it will stay as it is! What you've described there is probably the best way forwards, DCs should be just that, only a DC, all files and other storage should ideally be on dedicated boxes, that way it's easy to know what each server is doing in the organisation. Just make sure the NAS has a good fast network connection, a good failsafe RAID setup on the discs, and a good history of troublefree operation. Mike.

Take a copy of your user.man file and work on that. I do not recommend working on the live version as no users will be able to logon while you have the registry hive open! 1. load the user.man registry hive into Regedit, give it a name when asked, e.g for this example 'students' Note: You have select HKEY_USERS in order to get the option to load a registry hive in regedit. 2. navigate to the following key; 'HKEY_USERS\students\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders' Obviously substitute 'students' with whatever you called the registry hive when you loaded it. 3. You will see a string value called Favourites, probably with a default value of %USERPROFILE%\Favorites Change this to something like 'h:\favourites' (I don't recommend using unc paths or the %username% value as they don't seem to work for some reason) Obviously change H:\ for whatever your users' home drive is called. 4. There is also a second registry location 'HKEY_USERS\students\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders' with a string also called favourites which you can change as well. I can never remember which one windows actually uses, so change both for good measure, it doesn't appear to do any harm. 5. Unload the User.man file from regedit very important this bit, and quite often forgotten. Your profile will not work unless you remember to do this! 6. Test it! The users should get a directory called favourites on their H:\ (or whatever drive letter you used) and anything added to favourites in IE should appear in this directory. Hope that's helpful. Mike.

I did my GCSE about 12 years ago, and back then you were taught about the actual workings of a PC, how it all linked together and all the theory surrounding it. I don't think they even cover that sort of information at 'A' level these days. My 'A' level course we learnt programming in Pascal and Visual Basic as well as all the theory surrounding how the componants of a PC actually talked at low level, binary counting, how memory registers and the parts of a processor work, quite in depth stuff. I know for a fact they don't cover that sort of stuff until degree courses now. These days it's all about using a PC, and not about how they actually work. Mike.

The problems mentioned above with the profile remembering the home directory from the user it was created with is down to permissions within the user.man registry file. It's essential that you load the user.man file into regedit and ensure users can actually write to the sections that are needed. Remember the file permissions are different to the registry permissions within the file. Don't worry about doing this, the actual profile can't be changed by users as the network knows it's a mandatory pofile so it's never saved back to the server, it's only so scripts that are run at logon, and Group Policies can change necessary userkeys in the current_user part of the registry. I think you can also do this in the profiles section of system in control panel, but I normally load it into regedit manually as that's the way I was taught. Don't forget to unload it when you've finished making changes! If you don't make this change, you can and probably will experience a lot of problems with group policies not applying properly, and scripts that write to the registry not doing as they're supposed to. While you're editing the file, you can also re-direct favourites to their home drive e.g. h:\favourites by editing the necessary registry key; the folder is automatically created if it doesn't exist when the user logs on. Mike.