maniac

Easiest way I've found of shutting down machines is to create two batchfiles. Set one to run at machine startup with the commands; at /DELETE /YES at 21:00 /every:M,T,W,Th,F "\\domain\netlogon\shutdwn.bat" This adds a scheduled task that calls a script called shutdwn.bat on the netlogon share at 9:00 pm every day. You can adjust this as you need to of course. Then in the shutdwn.bat file, simply use this command shutdown -s -f -t 60 -c "End of day shutdown. Please save your work now, this workstation will shutdown in 1 Minute. This cannot be cancelled." Which obviously calls the windows built in shutdown command, and displays the appropreate message. This works like a charm for us and has done for the last year. It's pretty flexible as well as if you ever need to change or cancel it you can simply change the shutdwn.bat file accordingly. Every month or so we make it call defrag insted of shutdown. Incidently, do not name the batchfile 'shutdown.bat' else it will run itself in an endless loop! Mike.

I wanted to, but it would be the 5th time I've seen them if I went, I've seen them at Reading Festival in 2005, Earls Court in 2005, Hyde Park in 2006 and the O2 in 2007. They've been awesome everytime!! I'm hoping Dave Grohl might put in a guest appearance at Reading this year, have to wait and see I guess!

Just out of interest, what do you mean by massive?? We run Cubase here, and also have the settings incorporated into the mandatroy profile, but it's not had a big affect on the size of it from memory. All the students can run the program fine, and the logon time is around 30-40 seconds on most of the machines. What you could do is write a short script that that copies the necessary settings from a folder on the PC to the correct part of the local user profile then runs cubase. You can then point your cubase shortcut to this script insted of the program, so when a student runs it, the necessary settings are copied into the profile, then the program is run. You can then remove them from the mandatory profile. Providing your students have the right to execute VBS scripts then you're ok. Mike.

1. Devided firstly by students and staff, the students are then split by year group defined by year of entry so we don't have to change it every year, and the staff by administrators, teachers and support staff. Each OU has it's own polices etc. applied to it. 2. Loads of different groups defined within our active directory that allows/disallow access to different resources on our network. I have lots of VBS scripts that read this group information at logon and act on it accordingly setting things like Internet Explorer Homepage, drives that are mapped, printer mappings etc. I think we have over 100 different groups for various things, mainly e-mail distribution lists. 3. Students who have left get their account disabled and moved to an OU labelled Leavers. Same for staff. Once a year we purge these accounts and associated home areas, profiles etc. after taking a comprehensive backup just in case. 4. Our LDAP is microsoft active directory on server 2003. 5. I have some PHP scripts I've written which compare our student records in CMIS (our MIS system) to our active directory database, and it sends me an e-mail report notifying me of students in CMIS who don't have a network account, and students with a network account who no longer exist in CMIS so I can make sure every student in the school has a network account, and all the leavers get disabled ASAP. I could get it to make the adjustments automatically, but I like to do it manually so I know what's going on. This task is made easier by the fact we have Moodle which uses LDAP as it's auththentication, so my script uses the account information from moodle for the comparison purposes. Cheers, Mike.

Remember any debt is tied to the PERSON and not the PROPERTY. (with the exception of depts secured on the property itself) Baliffs cannot remove property unless they are certain that it belongs to the person owing the money, as if they remove someone elses property then this would be theft. Remember they deal with this on a daily basis, and are usually only threatening if they are threatened themselves. I had baliffs turn up at my last house which was a rental property. As soon as I told them I wasn't the person involved and the person they needed was no longer a tennent at the property, and provided them with some ID (which wasn't unreasonable to ask) they left no questions asked, and apologised for the inconvenience. We get letters at our current address in at least 5 different names. I write return to sender on them and post them back, but I do note the names and company names they have come from. We have had a couple of calls from other debt collectors here, but again as soon as you tell them the property is rented, and the date you moved in, they usually go away no further questions. Sometimes they'll mention one of the names I've noted down, which kinda proves the returned mail doesn't get back to it's owners! Mike.

Ever since upgrading to office 2007 SP1 we've been getting some very strange behaviour on ocassions from outlook. It tends to happen if I reset a users network profile for whatever reason, although not exclusively as it does sometimes randomly happen for no apparent reason. What happens is when outlook it run for the first time on the new profile, it runs through its normal wizard to connect to our exchange server, then promptly crashes and gives you the option to restart the program, which it does sucessfully but minus the preview window. As soon as I turn the preview window on, the program will freeze up and crash again, and keep doing this repeatedly if I either open an e-mail or turn on the preview window. The only remedy to solve it seems to be a completely un-install and re-install of office, which solves the problem - outlook then works fine. Note it has to be un-installed, simply doing a repair installation doesn't work! This problem is driving me mad, as I'm getting 2 or 3 laptops a week now suffering from it, and I'm fed up un-installing and re-installing office everytime! There must be a solution out there somwhere, but I can't find it! Has anyone else experienced this problem and has anyone got any ideas on how to solve it without completely re-installing the program from scratch everytime?? Note: The problem is tied to the machine, not the user. Once a machine starts suffering from this problem, any user that logs onto that machine will have trouble. Many thanks, Mike.

I don't go back quite far enough to remember NT4 as a workstation OS, The first school I worked at however did have an NT4 server as it's main domain controller, until I changed it for a slightly better server 2003 box. That server never fell over once in the time I was there, and it was still in use as an exchange server right up until I left (that was just 2 years ago) I know it's now retired however as the person who took over from me got rid of it, well it was on borrowed time really. RIP.

I still have a laptop running windows 2000 and it's the most reliable machine I own! It sits in my back room purely to play music from a shared network drive, and does it's job admirably! (It's an Acer travelmate 210, 400MHz with 64MB ram.) I did load XP on it once, but it really didn't like it. Windows 2000 was still the most reliable OS microsoft ever produced in my opinion.

I thought that may be the case, just wanted to confirm my thoughts! A majority of our switches are HP 2626 and 2524, so I'm pretty sure they should be able to filter multicast packets. Any idea what this feature is actually called in the switch thou?? Cheers, Mike.

I'm currently working on a project of distributing the output from our Digital Signage to other screens around the school. After looking at hardware solutions which were silly money, I've been experimenting with VLC Player outputing a multicast UDP stream, and I've had a lot of success with it. It does exactly what I want, and we can use old laptops we have as 'receivers' as it were, and put them anywhere we want. Now obviously using a multicast stream impacts on the whole network, and while I've not noticed any issues throughout messing around with it, I was wondering what the impact on our network might be if we have this running all day everyday? I Had also looked at streaming it as HTTP output, where each machine establishes its own connection to the server, but the problem with this is if the stream stops, then the player just sits there until you re-start it manually, which could end up being a pain if we end up with a lot of them round the school. With the multicast stream, the player stays there listening until the stream re-starts, and then just carrys on, obviously a big advantage. Anyone able to offer me any advise if it's a wise idea pushing a multicast stream onto my network or not? Cheers, Mike.

Ahhh, I didn't realise it worked like that, makes sense now. I have imaged the main partition as well, just incase, but I can always restore this from the CD that comes with them if necessary, just as quick to do it that way with a USB CD-ROM drive connected. Cheers, Mike.

I have SSL explorer installed to provide remote access for us and a few selected staff, and file access to all staff. The community edition is free to use, although all traces of that seem to have vanished from their website recently, so I think the days of it being free are numbered.

I settled for using this linux distro in the end http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/ which includes the Partimage utility that let me image the partitions nice and quickly. Got it running from a USB hard drive (eventually) - USB memory stick was just too slow to boot, and I'm in the process of writing a simple script to automate the process, should be really slick when it's done. (anticipating lots of these being broken by kids, so we want a really simple way of restoring them back to normal) Also discovered it's only the second partition I need to image to transfer across all my changes (but I expect any linux user could have told me that, but I'm very new to linux!) which is only about 75mb in size, so imaging them takes only minutes each. Mike. P.S on a side note, anyone know how to disable the console window shortcut in easy mode, as it's only a matter of time until one of the bright ones figures out how to get this up and starts fiddling.

I suppose it could look good in a corner of the office, but I thinks it may outgrow its surroundings a little. Beats the rather dead looking yucca plant sitting behind me!

Not sure how other VLES do it or how it's done with SIMS, but as an example I've written an selection of PHP scripts that automatically sync moodle with CMIS, it has a simple user interface built in that allows you to add CMIS teaching groups to Courses created within moodle, and then using this information it allocates the correct kids to the various courses etc. It also notifys me when students that are in moodle don't exist anymore in CMIS (i.e have left the school) so we can disable their accounts on the network, and does the same for new starters, so we can create their account ahead of them starting (how efficient!) It runs the main part of the program as a batch (or CRON) job every night, as part of this is checks all the group memberships against cmis and moves students around as necessary, it also e-mails me a detailed report. Its deadly accurate, I can see staright away what students have moved groups from the report, and I can trigger it manually if necessary e.g if there's a new starter that deperately needs to use moodle, and their account has only just been created. I would imagine a VLE that links to SIMS would read the data in a simelar fashion, and use it in a simelar way and probably as a batch job as well as this is by far the easiest way of syncronising two systems. I know some systems will also feed assesment data back into the MIS, as well as use the MIS data for creation of accounts etc. Moodle uses LDAP here, their CMIS student number is added in AD when the accounts are created to tie it all together. Mike.

I filled up a skip with BBC micros, plus monitors and other associated hardware at my last job. They were taking up the room the school decided to give me as an office! That was only 4 years ago as well!! Couldn't resist powering one or two of them up, and they all worked. It was a shame to have to skip them really, but I wanted an office! Mike.

Why would a teacher require network admin rights anyway? If it's for installing software, or being able to have more control over their PC, then we give them Local only admin rights on the workstation they use, that way they can't screw up any other systems on the network. It actually works well, because we know they can't mess with the actual network, and they know we can't blame them when things go wrong! Mike.

Well I've got software restrictions setup and working here, the attached PDF is an export of my settings so you can see how I've done it if anyone wants to. I went down the Disallowing everything, then adding in the allowed rules where necessary. Everything that needs to run works, and anything else doesn't!! EXE Restrictions.pdf

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, lots of things to look at now!

I never did post that script did I. Anyway here it is, all it does is copy the icons from the netlogon share at machine startup to a folder called c:\settings\students removing the previous copies and overwriting with a fresh copy. If you then point the desktop and startmenu re-direction to the relevant local folders, it stops the machine making requests over the network every time the start menu is used, and also stops laptops loosing their startmenus and desktops when they loose their wireless signal. Any new icons added to the server appear on the machines when they are re-booted, and it works well. Also as a bonus it reads the machines OU from active directory and copies different icons to the machines depending on what OU they are in, as well as copying a standard set of icons to all machines. I've been using this for a while now, and have had no real problems with it. It really is very simple. on error resume next Const OverWriteFiles = True Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") objFSO.DeleteFolder("C:\settings\students") objFSO.CopyFolder "\\school\netlogon\stupol\Shortcuts\Basic icons" , "C:\settings\students" , OverWriteFiles Set objWshNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network") Set objAdsSystemInfo = CreateObject("adsysteminfo") Set objComputerName = GetObject("LDAP://" & objAdsSystemInfo.ComputerName) Set objOU = GetObject(objComputerName.Parent) strOU = replace(objOU.Name,"OU=","") Select Case strOU Case "103" objFSO.CopyFolder "\\school\netlogon\stupol\Shortcuts\103" , "C:\settings\students" , OverWriteFiles Case "106" objFSO.CopyFolder "\\school\netlogon\stupol\Shortcuts\106" , "C:\settings\students" , OverWriteFiles End Select Just add more case statements for more OUs as necessary. Hope that helps someone! Mike

As title suggests, how would I go about imaging 47 Asus EEE machines with the linux build containing all the customisations I've spent the last few days creating? I don't really want to do them all individually if I can help it, and would be handy to have the ability to re-image them quickly as and when the kids break them like we do with all our windows machines. I'm relatively new to linux so I've no idea where to start really, would something like ghost work with a linux machine? Many Thanks, Mike.

I've got a VB script which runs at workstation startup which copies all the shortcuts from the server to the workstation at boot, then my group policy is set to redirect to this local folder containing the shortcuts. This makes the start menu and desktop more reliable, and stops them disappearing on wireless laptops when the wireless disconnects. It also copies different icons to workstations dependant on the OU the machine is in. That way I can make sure only the music PCs have the music shortcuts, only the Art PCs have the graphics shortcuts etc. so there are no redundant or pointless shortcuts on the start menus or desktops, very neat! If anyone wants the script, I'll post it up. Mike.

Thanks for those suggestions. @Craiglay, that was perfect except that it also gets hidden with the hide system tray option in Group Policy enabled, so it doesn't solve my problem @Jona One of those links is blocked by my LEA, and the second the download link is broken for but thanks for the suggestions, might check the first one out at home tonight. I've downloaded about 15 different utilities that do battery monitoring, but all of them use the system tray. If I could use the system tray then I'd just use the standard microsoft battery notification, but I'm trying to find one that doesn't use the system tray, without any luck at the moment! Someone somewhere must have written one! Mike.

We've got the system tray disabled for all our students in this school, mainly to stop them accessing graphics control panels and the like that enjoy running in the system tray. However this poses a problem, which is the students don't get any form of battery monitor whe or a low battery warning etc. when they're using laptops. I don't want to enable the system tray if I can help it, so I'm looking for a simple battery monitor application which will sit at the top/bottom of the screen and inform the user of the battery state and when it's running low. Anyone know of a utility that will do this? All the ones I've found run in the system tray, which I explicitly want to avoid. Failing that, anyone know how I can control what's visible in the system tray via Group policy or simelar so I make sure only the volume control and battery status is visible. Cheers, Mike.

All requests must go through the helpdesk, no exceptions! Get your SMT to back it as well, then when they go complaining to them about 'how long it takes them' you'll be backed up by SMT. You'll be surprised how quickly people get used to it once they don't have a choise, we've been running ours about 15 months here and we've just had our 3020th ticket put in (literally this second!) Mike.