baronne

We run workshops or labs for our customers and am interested to know what is used in the education space ... I haven't been in the education industry for quite some time, but I thought I would come here to ask the question. Essentially we want an easy to manage service (cloud preferred, but will host ourselves if necessary). Some of the features we are looking for: - ability to deploying workshops/labs (I guess like a classroom) - schedule deployment to start and end at specific dates (vm's are stopped and destroyed when workshop/lab is over) - ability to send invites to participants so they can access their desktop (which they will use for the duration of the workshop) - ability to easily manage custom images of the desktop (with our own custom software installed) - control/lock down desktop for participants - instructor remote access to assist participants - vm's are kept secure and up to date with updates/patches etc. I figure these sort of things would be bread and butter in the classroom/education space. What tools/services do you use? Do you hand roll yourself? Do you use cloud services like AWS or Azure? Any open source / free tools? Any recommendations would be welcome! thanks!

Our monitoring is done differently across the different departments, for example the Windows Server Team use HP's Insight Manager. We use a variety of tools in our department, Network & Security, such as PRTG Traffic Grapher, Splunk, Snort, SGUIL, etc. etc. baronne

hey domino, yeah we do - I did put the idea forward at first as we use it to track allsorts of other things like licensing, etc. But we need some level of automation in there like SNMP etc. cheers baronne

Hi michael, it's not just windows servers we're managing which makes it all the more difficult to manage. We're talking 20-30 firewalls, oodles of switches, routers and other encryptors, unix servers, etc. etc. It's features like NAT'ing - being able to record "links" between NAT addresses and real addresses, MAC addresses, location, notes, etc. As I say IPplan is reasonably good, but just doesn't cut the mustard. I have read about various commercial products such as Bluecoat??? But haven't investigated them yet. cheers for all your inputs. baronne

btw. I don't work in a school. I used to, and occasionally found this forum useful for finding free/inexpensive tools to manage the network.

DHCP server is not an IP address management system.

when you manage over 7000 IPs and about 400 subnets excel is a little bit on the sh1t side. I'm looking for something to auto-discover changes in DNS. Also we're looking for auditing - historical changes to IP addresses.

hi folks, I wondered if any of you could recommend an IP address management tool. I have been using IPplan for a little while but I find it a little buggy and "unfinished". Any suggestions most welcome. cheers Baronne

looks good! I'll get me a ubuntu server setup soonish so we can test this baby out! cheers!

servers, switches, etc.

Hi folks, Any good recommendations for network monitoring software, free or commercial? cheers Baronne

hi folks, I used to have this handy little script that I could run and it would query the AD againts a folder location (eg. Profiles folder or Home Folder) - it would then prompt to delete any folder that had no corresponding user account in the directory. Anybody got a little script handy? I can't for the life of me track it down on the web cheers Baronne

Hi folks, We're looking for a few (or one integrated) software products to monitor our servers as well as monitoring PCs. I know there are quite a few server monitoring tools including monitor magic from the friendly tools4ever sponsors on this board. Are there any other server/network monitoring tools you guys would recommend? As far as the PC/user monitoring goes, we want to gather information like, how often a user logged on, PCs usage frequency, which applications they have run, etc. --- anybody know of something like this you could recommend? I spotted something called Express Meter from Express Metrix which deals with software. Cheers Baronne

We've been using One or Zero for a while now, but we are in the process of setting up Microsoft SMS for inventory etc. and will keep an eye out for a helpdesk package that can integrate with SMS. Anybody know of such an application? cheers Baronne

ahh yes, cool I get it... yeah - a managed service - something like what Messagelabs have been offering for years. You can divert your DNS on your mail and web through their service. Sounds good on the surface, but I like having a bit more control over the security, and to be able to walk over to my servers and manage them myself where necessary. cheers baronne

robiano: what do you mean on demand?

Check out ManageEngine's ADManager Plus http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/ad-manager/help/index.html I've had this tool on my machine for some time and it looks like this may make things a little easier for me. I've just never really looked at it properly. but it is handy for creating bulk users and it also has a bulk modify thingy, so I can export from our MIS to CSV and then use ADManager to do the business! cheers baronne

I'm having real troubles with permissions in particular. I am trying to point my home directory to a UNC share on a DFS path. I've done the delegation thingy in AD for the server-to-server trust thinggy majig wotsit. yeah.... a howto would be awesome! cheers baronne

I may sound like a newbie here, but how to you look at it via LDAP? cheers Baronne

SmartFilter had it already.... sweet.

ahh coool... all clear now... cheers Baronne

When I look at my user objects in AD I don't see an EmployeeID... does one need to dig into ADSIEDIT or something? Also... is it possible then to have a custom field in Active Directory?

nothing has ever been done to link the two together... this is the first instance of trying to get some unity between the systems and keep some sort of order among the (slight) chaos. I'm gonna go for a manual approach to tidy first and then once it is sorted, I can work on a way of tracking & sync'ing accounts baronne

cheers.. I'm not a developer, so that's a bit of a mouthful all that code, but I guess one could slowly but surely keep at it. However, fiddling about with the live system, I'm not sure I want to do........... baronne

unfortunately not... it's never been captured into the MIS. So I expect a manual process of entering their usernames into the database. ...hmmm