maniac

Take a look at this forum page from the moodle.org website, it should help you find the correct files to edit to achieve this. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=79669 Mike.

You just cleared up that for me, always wondered what the difference between incremental and differential backups was. Thanks for that! Mike

We have a U:\ driver (U for users!) mapped to all staff at logon, which gives them read only access to all student user areas. Selected ICT staff and SLT members have Read/Write access as it was requested from above. This causes horrendous problems with staff not understanging the difference with cut and copy! Never give out read/write access unless you absolutely have to. Data protection issues have been discussed, and it was decided that as long as the students are aware staff have access to their home areas, then there was no come back, so all Students are made aware of this fact when they start at the school. It helps cut down on the amount of music and dodgey photos of stuff that the kids keep in their home areas, as insted of just the 4 of us looking at them, there's now 150 people keeping an eye on things! Mike.

I'm glad it wasn't just me who had this problem, with my USB floppy drive it read the drivers fine when your pressed F6 and found the drive, allowed me to partition it etc. but when it started copying files, it prompted me to insert floppy in drive A, and would not read from the USB floppy drive no matter what I did! Where would we be without nlite! Mike.

Our nightly backup is nearing 700GB now, that's a full backup of all staff and student home areas and shared drives, plus all system states and other critical files. We use hardware compression on our tape drive, which is a Quantum 8 tape LTO3 changer, which enables us to get about 550-600GB on a tape (Nativa capacity is 400GB on LTO3) we now use 2 tapes per night. Veritas should tell you if you're getting data errors, and you should be able to set your reporting to e-mail you if it does detect errors as well, which should help ensure any backup taken is going to be restorable. We're going to move to incremental backups with a full one on a friday, or some sort of disk backup system soon I think as data is growing at about 1GB a day on average. Mike.

We have around 8 HP 3600 printers in this school, and they are very reliable and fairly quick for what they are. Running costs are OK too, you can get cheap compatible cartridges if you want to use them, but we don't. The only problems we've had are with the paper trays, which seem to break easily, we've got through 2 so far! They are only about £30 for a replacement thou, which is quite reasonable. Mike.

If you buy machines with Vista business edition OEM licenses, then I believe you have a 'downgrade' right which allows you to use XP on them without purchasing any additional licences. This was taken from this document; http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/2/3/d23b9533-169d-4996-b198-7b9d3fe15611/downgrade_chart.doc =============================== Q. Can I downgrade my OEM version of Microsoft Windows Vista Business to Windows XP Professional? A. Yes. OEM Downgrade Rights for desktop operating systems apply to Windows Vista Business & Vista Ultimate as stated in the License Terms. Please note, OEM downgrade versions of Windows Vista Business and Vista Ultimate are limited to Microsoft Windows XP Professional (including Tablet PC Edition & x64 Edition). End users can use the following media for their downgrade: Volume Licensing media (provided the end user has a Volume Licensing agreement), Retail (FPP), or System Builder hologram CD (provided the software is acquired in accordance with the Microsoft OEM System Builder License). Use of the downgraded operating system is governed by the Windows Vista Business License Terms, and the end user cannot use both the downgrade operating system and Windows Vista Business. There are no downgrade rights granted for Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic or Home Premium. ====================================== It doesn't matter what license key is actually used for the installation, as long as the case has the OEM license sticker on for Vista business or Ultimte then you'll be covered as I understand it. Mike.

Actually that is a good procedure netman, can see it pretty much applying to any situation where you can't get the correct RAID drivers into windows setup, I've kept it for future reference! Cheers!

We've got one of these, literally just set it up over the half term break to host our e-portal installation. We also had the same problem initially, but we managed to integrate the driver into the build using nlite with no problems, it worked first time. Has yours got the LSI 1068 disk controller by any chance?? What I wasn't impressed with was the controller card died on me about 3 days after we had the server. HP were very good at sending out a replacement, I had it the next day, but it did take it a very long time to replecate the drives again once the new controller was installed. It's been OK ever since. If you've got the LSI card, then I have the correct drivers I can send you if you still require them. Mike.

If it's exchange 2003 then you can create the mailboxes in bulk within active directory, providing you have the exchange admin tools installed on the machine your accessing the activedirectory management console on (which can be installed from the exchange setup CD.) It's simply a case of highlighting them all, right hand click, exchange tasks and create new mailbox and follow the wizard through. It will do them all in seconds. For students to access it I would use the exchange webmail interface, as it will authenticate them automatically without any tricky configuration of outlook etc, and it has all the features they've likely to need. Mike.

Good old selectamark for us! It's messy yes, but it does the job well. We also have foil asset labels with the school name and postcode on which are suposidly un-removeable, but they don't work very well. Mike.

We've gone back to buying genuine power supplies for our laptops, as we've found compatible ones are more un-reliable, they seem to fail very quickly in comparison and also tend to get damaged much more easily, the cables are thinner and the casings are more brittle generally. Not sure what's the main reason other people have to replace them, but ours is because teachers wind the cables round the power supplys and get them all twisted so eventually they break! Mike.

It's always the quiet ones you have to watch

Has the cat6 cable actually been fully tested at GBs speed remembering 100mbs only uses 2 pairs of the cable, but 1gbs speed uses all 4 pairs so it might be possible that one of the two normally un-used pairs is faulty, which wouldn't show up unless a GBs signal was put through it, hence the reason it works ok at 100mbs. just an idea. Mike.

There's a GPO setting that allows you to let admin users have access to profiles as well as the user the profile belongs to. We have this set, and it solves a lot of problems with accessing stuff when we need to. It only works when the profile is created by the network for the first time however, so switching it on won't alter the permissions on profiles you already have. However you can run a XCALS command on the necessary folders to do this, but be careful as in my experience it's easy to mess up permissions on profile folders, then they won't work properly! That VBS script I posted should just work as is, as long as the user running it has access to the folder its deleting of course! Please test it somewhere non-critical first thou! Mike.

Try these two lines of VB script, they will remove all folders and their contents where the folder ends in _nfrs Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") objFSO.DeleteFolder("G:\profiles\*_nfrs.*") mike.

Remember under the Data Protection Act the school has to make sure all reasonable measures are put in place to prevent the missuse of data stored on its servers. Because this member of staff is letting students use their login, which creates the opportunity for data missuse and the school is now aware of it, I think you'd be well within your rights to restrict down their rights on the system to ensure the school is complying with the act. That's just one angle you might like to take, but I'd get your SLT to authrise any such action as well as making them fully aware of the potential repercussions of things like this. Mike.

This is what my screen looks like if I try and print from a restricted account. I get two messages, one from the client software in the form of a balloon, and a popup from the messenger service as well. Mike.

Weetabix is probably the one cereal that's not crunchy (once you put the milk on) that's why I think his response was quite funny. Mike.

I've done some research into this in the past, and it's more tricky than most changes as the reg key to control quicklaunch is quite a complex one as it store information on the entire taskbar configuration. If the users you want to change are using a mandatory profile then you'd be better off making the necessary change on you 'master profile' and creating a new mandatory profile. If the users are using roaming or local profiles, then there are a few websites out there with suggested solutions, but when I tried them none of them actually seemed to work properly. The best article I found was this one. How can I enable the Quick Launch toolbar via a logon script or Group Policy? Mike.

Ha Ha. That's the sort of reply you'd get from me too I'm afriad, quite a witty one too. :D Mike

Print management software simplifies this process greatly. You can do instant searches on users, what they've printed where and when, produce useage graphs, see how my colour printing gets printed vs B/W. Also asides from the monitoring side, you can introduce certain 'rules' to stop people printing multiple copies, stop users printing to certain printers, give users a certain number of 'credits' to encourage them to think about what they're printing, limit a colour printer to B/W only for certain users, and a hundred other settings. So yes, I think it's a pretty essential part of most networks these days, especially when the likes of papercut do a version of their product you can use for free for monitoring purposes. Some schools do charge users when when they go over their quota. Personally we don't, we use Papercut mainly for finding out how much stuff is actually being printed and where, so we can plan how much toner we need to order! We do have a few users on restricted accounts who have historically abused the printing system thou. Mike.

We use these for all our whiteboard installs. Vision AV-1301 Stereo AMP & SP-1300 Speaker *PAIR* - Misco.co.uk OK there's a seperate amp so it's not as neat as some, but as most of our classrooms have a shelf for DVD player/video player already it doesn't pose a problem. Also it has 4 imputs so you can wire all the items in permanetly without swapping cables around, and it has 'PC' and 'DVD' marked on the selector dial so staff can't forget what to select for the devices connected! Also comes with all necessary leads, speaker cable and mounting brackets for speakers and has 2 mic inputs as well. Really versatile and loud enough for any classroom. Mike.

I think it might work, but you could run into some problems. Firstly, SQL Server 2005 Express can access only a single CPU and 1 GB of RAM, which might be a problem if you're running a lot of users on E-portal as that can be quite heavy on database queries. Also the maximum database size on SQL serever 2005 express is 4GB, which you could get to at some point in the future with Sercos product, our's has been running for 3 years now and our database is about 1.4GB now, and is increasing a lot faster in recent times as Serco add features to their products. Apart from those limitations, I don't think there's any reason it won't work, but personally I would recommend you get the full edition of SQL server if you can. Mike.

Download LDAP browser from Softterra, (bottom of the page, free program) Softerra LDAP Administrator & Browser: Directory Management Tool Download You can then look at all of a users properties in a proper view that's compatible with LDAP and it tells you all the field names as well. Also really useful for specifying the correct OU in the LDAP language, as you can copy it straight out of the program. Very useful tool when you're doing things with LDAP. Mike.