maniac

Texting services can see if the message has been delivered or not in the same way as we can with services like schoolcomms and the same way you can have a delivery report returned to your mobile when you send a message, so replying to them should not make a great deal of difference as they will already know if a number exists or not. I used to get a lot of them after I ut my number in on one of the comparison websites and they irritated the hell out of me so one day I just though what the hell, I keep getting them anyway so replied STOP to some of them and amazingly they did. Mike.

Well I can't bend the metal back by hand, so I'd say they're pretty strong. They really went for it to get into this cabinet, must have taken a lot of force to have bent the door out. They've seperated the long hinge from the door all the way down the side, the locks are still locked and in place. The side doors are only a token effort to hide the chargers away, and they are weak and flimsy.

It's a loxit lapbank trolly. I e-mailed a picture of it to their design team this afternoon showing how it had been broken into - they were quite surprised I think.

That's up to the business manager to decide, out of my hands. They've never bothered claiming for losses under £5000 before, as it generates so much paperwork, it's actually not economic to do it and in the grand scheme of things ammounts under that are not really significant sums of money. I'll probably get told to just order some replacements.

Well we've got to replace it with something, and as I say they're still the strongest cabinets I've ever seen. We had a lapsafe one broken into at one of the schools I worked at, and that was a lot easier to get into than this one appears to have been.

Yes the police were in this morning dusting the room for prints, not sure if they found anything of use. They chose the worst room if they wanted things of value, as they were only Stone netbooks in the cabinet worth less than £200 each to replace, and they didn't get the power packs either. In fact I'm more annoyed about the damaged cabinet which is beyond repair as it's all warped out of shape now, that's about £2000 to replace on its own. Mike.

Happend over the weekend, 11 netbooks stolen. I consider these cabinets to be some of the most secure I've ever come across, and it still wasn't a match for a crowbar.

Normal car batteries will be fine, as long as you don't drain them flat and re-charge them a lot. They'll be ok for a while, but the capacity will slowly fall on each re-charge, reaching the stage where eventually the battery will be useless.

Well if you were to use my suggestion of putting a reverse proxy in there, you get all the sub-domains directed to the same IP number and that IP number routed to your 4th server which you install apache webserver on. You then you have to program apache to look at the website address the request is coming from, and send the appropreate content from the appropreate server. You do this using the apache modules Virtual_host and mod_proxy which can be confugred together to do this - see here for a guide http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/vhosts/examples.html#page-header (About 3/4 of the way down you need the bit that says Using Virtual_host and mod_proxy together) This should point you in the right direction unless anyone has any better ideas? Mike.

It is possible to mount the skydrive via WEBdav, but it's a very awkward process as not all your users skydrives will end up being on the same servers at microsofts end. That and it's quite an awkward process to find out the server name in the first place, microsoft don't just give it to you, oh no that would be far too easy. There are a couple of utlities that exist which will make the process easy, mapping the drive simply by the users putting in their username and password, but to get full features from them you have to buy them. Automatically syncing them thou, not sure it can be done, or at least in the course of my research I've not discovered how to do it. As said, wait for 365, it's more likely the features of this will allow what you want to a certain degree. Mike.

Run the whole lot through a reverse proxy. I had this exact same problem a few years ago at another school. We had the website on one server, the E-Portal service on another server, Webmail on another. I setup a 4th box as a reverse proxy which served the whole lot out through a single address, and it worked very well. In fact 3 years on the school are still using the very same setup. You can setup a reverse proxy very easily using Apache webserver on windows or linux. Mike.

Any deep cycle battery will be a Gel type or AGM - collectively called VRLA (Valve regulated lead acid.) A wet cell bettery can only be discharged down to approximately 50% of it's capacity before it starts to have problems, where as a proper deep cycle battery will be able to be discraged down to approximately 80% with no detrimental effects on re-charging. Beware thou, not all VRLA batteries are deep cycle, it's important to make sure the battery is specified as deep cycle if you intend to discharge it a lot, or the life of the battery will be short. As for recommending one to you, can't really help a lot there to be honest. I only know what I do because many years ago I had some training on all this stuff from some nice people at Bosch because of the job I was doing at the time.

It was event 2019 that was plaguing our error logs, I've just looked back at my notes. Is that the same error you're getting?

Ah yes that sounds familiar, I'd have a guess that the two are linked.

What happens if you log onto the actual server while this is happening? I used to get issues like this ocassionally, and when I then logged onto the actual server it used to generate me errors saying the system was out of resources and was un-able to log me on or, or was logging me on with a local profile - all sorts of weird and wonderful messages like this. We also got issues with users accessing their home areas etc. at the same time. Used to happen ever 2 weeks or so to our storage server. I did find a fix for it, but unfortunitely I can't actually remember what it was now. I know it entailed changing some registry values however. Mike.

The problem with any battery offering that sort of capacity is it's going to be heavy. I've used one of the 'leisure batteries' from halfrauds (I don't recommend buying one from there thou, as they are very expensive) and used to run a little 12v fridge off it when I went camping - it would run for several days from one of them. They are designed to be deep cycle batteries, infact any battery described as a 'leisure battery' would probably do the trick for you, they're the ones people have in caravans to power the lighting etc. You can charge them up using a normal car battery charger. As for the cable, I made one up myself which I use in my garage for powering my 12v tyre inflator from a powerpack, didn't cost me anything as I already had the bits knocking around. Mike.

If you hunt around, screens aren't actually that expensive. I've been obtaining 15.6" widescreen LCD panels for as little as £56 recently. Keyboards are annoying because of the frequency of damage, although we have such a good stock of spares now we can repair most with no cost incurred. The problem with accidental damage cover is if you claim too many times, they will start to question the validity of the claims as essentially it's an insurance policy, so they can turn round and declare it void if they suspect some of the claims are not ligitimate i.e the damage was not accidental. This is unlikely to happen, but companies are being much more strict about this sort of thing than they ever have been.

HDD's are covered by the warranty up to 3 years, and I've never had problems getting them changed if they malfunction so it's not a terribly important consideration. It doesn't take long to re-image the machine and get it back in use, and for those out of warranty I can source replacement drives for around £20 each so it's no big deal. SSD's need to come down in price just a little bit more before I will consider buying machines with them in, the problem of HDD's failing isn't quite big enough to warrent the extra expense at the moment. Once the difference is down to maybe as little as £10 or £20 per machine to have it with an SSD drive, then we might make the change. Mike

Never just change the batteries in those things, 90% of them have to be re-synced to the car before they will work again. You can find the procedures for doing this on various forums for most populcar models of car. If you get your car serviced by a dealership, they normally change the remote batteries as part of the service, so in theory you should never have this problem. Mike

I've had a Blaupunkt car stereo that takes SD cards for about the last 4 years, it is dead handy. The only problem with my one is it doesn't read high capacity cards, so you're limited to 2GB which is still a fair amount of music, but does mean I now have about 6 or 7 SD cards floating around the car, and they're more awkward to change than CD's!

At one school I had a very old fibre converter (it ran at just 10MBs to give you an idea of the age of it) which had a 'test' mode on which basically shone a red light out of both the receiver and transmitter node on the box - presumably designed for this very purpose, was dead handy and I used it a lot. I've never seen it on any other fibre converter since mind. Mike.

As @nicklec said, you can't setup a wireless with a pre shared key using GPO. However, it's not actually that hard to setup your wireless network to use a RADIUS server if your access points support authenticating to one, then you can use a GPO to push your wireless settings to your clients - it does save a lot of hassle if you get this working.

3 hour minimum battery life 3 yr one-site next business day warranty Minimum of 2GB ram, but must be upgradeable. Availability of spare parts at reasonable costs like power supplies, keyboards and screens Supporting G and N band wireless I don't focus on the processor, chipset and hard drive size as much, I just get the best I can for a given price at the time I'm looking for the machines. I avoid Acer, because I find they're not very durable and I've had horredous problems with their support in the past I avoid Dell for laptops because of well documented power supply problems that have cost us over £1000 in replacement power supplies over the last 2 years, and a lot of our time changing them in cabinets as well. I like stone laptops because they come with a 3 year battery warranty as standard and so far have been very reliable Our charging arrangements are in cabinets within individual departments with the department assuming responsibility for the cabinet, and reporting any technical faults to us. Each cabinet is checked each holiday period by us, but during term time the teachers are responsible for making sure the resources get put away properly - they soon learn the importance of this when they want to use the machines for a lesson and they're all flat through not being plugged in. They use standard chargers which are cabled tied in place inside the cabinets - the only problem with this is periodically cables get trapped in the doors and damaged, but I think this issue would occur no matter what cabinet be brought. (In an ideal world I'd like to see a universal charging solution where pretty much any make of laptop could be slotted into it and charged - I feel we're a long way from seeing this in practise, although I do keep touting the idea to suppliers whenever I get the chance.) I'm happy to comment further, we have quite a lot of laptops in this school and buy at least 60 new ones every year. Mike.

Well that link doesn't work, not even a ping, although it does return an IP address of 92.43.71.114 when you look it up. The 10.xx.xx.xx address will be an internal only address which will probably only work within your school or within your LEA if they provide your connectivity. If your connection is provided by your LEA, it may be worth speaking to their support people regarding this external connection as they will be able to tell you what to do to get it working, and the corrrect addresses to visit to get the page up. Mike.

This banner made me laugh, so we stopped to take a picture. http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/Misc/n586769185_2650367_4909455.jpg Nothing to do with your outstanding ofsted (well done!) but it's a good excuse to post it.