Butuz

Aah. (git!) Butuz

I heared there was a 2 - 4 year wait to get on???!! IS that true? Butuz

Oh man whever they do those road trips it makes me want to jump in the car and hurtle across europe - I NEED THOSE TUNNELS!!! Maybe next summer I'll get round to actually doing it! Butuz

I am getting this exact error too. It happens on any user, but on only one particular machine. I have checked the Connect.ini and it is all fine (identical to the PC next to it, which works) i've done some test to check that the SQL server can be pinged by both its IP and resolve its name, and i still cant find anything wrong with the PC. My LEA have no idea what it is either. Andrew

The only option is to pay a professional data recovery company lots of cash to recover the data off all 4 of the disks. If you don't want to do that you do not really have any other option. Andrew

Simple answer - yes! Butuz

Yep these look good to run openoffice or the like. Paritularly handy for us as these little laptops could connect to our Terminal Server and give a full wammy interface. Veeeeryyyyy interesting. Hope to get one to try soon Andrew

The best Vista edition for schools in my oppinion is XP Pro Sad, but true! Vista will be staying off my network for the forseeable future. Andrew

I have done it through SIMS.net itself - we have a dedicated PC in every teaching room with SIMS.net installed, and the teacher logs into sims and can simply double click whatever lesson they wish in order to mark the kids in or out. It works reliably. I have not tried SIMS through IE yet - I dont think our LEA have actuaklly got the webarts thing running yet. Andrew

Only use originals here. Did try a spell with Compatibles but I had several toners that leaked so gave up on that idea. Andrew

The server is in the classroom?! Servers are noisy because they need to be kept cool, and generally have faster, louder components. The antec is a good case though. Generally the bigger the fans the quieter they are for the same amount of air flow - so if your server has 4 x 120mm fans in it it will be alot quieter than a rack mount server with 8 x 40mm fans for example. Andrew

8O :!: Any Network Manager worth their salt puts the needs of the school first rather than the needs of their own ego. Butuz

Yeh I used a Dell server as our Forest root when I had CC3 put in - RM were not too chuffed Mind you when the dell server comitted suicide and took our network down - I bought a pair of RM servers Butuz

Thanks for the reply GrumbleDook - its food for thought! Dont envy you for the laptops though Butuz

Wow!!!! Zero to Ban in 0.3 seconds 8O Butuz

Yes but people who have worked outside education are not likeley to want to work in education unless they win the lottery? How many experienced engineers that have worked in business do you know that would apply for an ICT Tech job in a school? Andrew

Well personally here we have a wide selection of computers - lots of different types of RM, Dell, Dan, HP/Compaq and a couple of no name nasty ones. All will build correctly as long as you have loaded the correct network drivers into the build area. Workstations that can not be built tend to be el-cheapo ones that have network cards with no DOS drivers available - not really RM's fault to be honest. A for your team having a high level skill set - thats all well and good (well, its very good!) but what if your team were to leave, or even god forbid the red bus syndrome happened - you were all going to a technical seminar together and your car was crashed - all of a sudden your school has a system implemented by high level staff - and those high level staff are not there, any temorary staff the school can get will probably not be high level, all of a sudden your school may be in big trouble. This is one thing RM gives you - firstly you may be able to get some temorary staff in to help manage your network - if they read the RM user guide etc, or even went on an emergency managing CC3 course - they would probably do a decent job of doing the day to day stuff. Secondly - RM will support you in an emergency situation, with their engineers dialing in to help etc. If the horrid situation described above were to happen I would be willing to wager a CC3 school could cope far better than a Vanilla school. and this is one situation where most people do not take into account when chosing a network system. Andrew

I always make a massive number of mistakes while typing and always have to re-read what I typed a couple of times even though I can actually spell quite well. Same goes for writing. Not my fault! Might be an idea to have a dyslexia test if your having serious problems. Andrew

Ah out of interest how are you running the program - are you using the standard shortcut that was created by the package - or are you running CDROM player and running it like that? If your using the program shortcut that came with the package - you can't. If you wish to use a shortcut to start a VCDROM program you need to create a special shortcut: "C:\Program Files\Research Machines\CD ROM Player\CDROMPlayer.exe" /L:CDROMNAME And replace CDROMNAME with the actual name of the VCD. This will launch the CDROM platyer title in the background, and automatically load the VCD into drive U. The above should work provided that the title is set up correctly in CDROM database. Andrew

GrumbleDook that is a very impressive staff structure - made me nice and jealous ready for dinner! Do you mind me asking more about your school. I see your a Tech College, how many pupils / staff / workstations etc do you have roughly? I am doing nearly all of your orgchart.pdf on my own at the moment and it really is not working. Andrew

Its a very good way of building / imaging workstations that are not all identical. I am pretty sure there are not many schools out there that have actually standardised on one particular workstation type, and then replace them every 3 years. This makes imaging very easy and this is why corporate networks dont tend to need RM's build process. However if you rewind to a network where you have maybe 40 different workstation types with an age varying over 5 years - THEN RM's build process comes in extremely useful. Norton ghost etc on the other hand would be the opposite of useful. People who bash RM, usually have only had experience with a badly set up / badly run CC3 network. Andrew

Impressive theivery! I am very interested as I have lots of Ascend's here - what spec are the machines, and what CPU's did they have (i.e intel / amd?) Also where are you based? Butuz

RM Servers are based on the Intel standard server range which means they are tested, and reliable, if a tad slower and sometimes slightly more out of date than some others. IBM make the most reliable servers but they are expensive, RM are somewhere in the middle, Dell are cheap and fast but in my experience unreliable. Would like to try HP servers as I am very impressed with their Procurve switch range. Overall you can't go particularly wrong with RM's servers. Just make sure you get some equivalent quotes from Dell / HP etc so you can lever RM's price down a tad. Butuz

How old is the UPS? The battery in the UPS degrades over time until it becomes almost unusable - this can take years, but if your UPS is over 3 years old you could well be having battery problems which mean in the event of a short blackout or brownout the battery could fail to take the strain and the UPS will turn off. This is not good for your servers! The APC software will tell you how healthy your battery is, if you do not want to re-install the software on your main server, then you can install the software onto another server, or even a workstation and simply plug the UPS lead into that server or workstation. Andrew

You need to build the virtual CD image first - then mount the image into Drive U and create the package using the installer from your virtual CD drive U, rather than using the installer off the actual CDROM. The way you've done it means the package is always looking for the CD in the local CDROM drive rather than looking for the virtual CDROM. RM Application Wizard has a wizard for doing what you need to do. Open up AppWiz and then click "Manage a Multimedia Title" then click "Install a new Multimedia Title" and the wizard will guide you through creating the virtual CDROM and creating the package. Butuz