srochford

The art/design/media areas are often mentioned as reasons for using Macs but there are other places they're used. I work in a university and we have lots of people using Macs in Maths and Physics (and elsewhere but that's the bit I know!) Some of them use them because they want pretty toys on their desks but mostly they're used because the user needs Unix but wants a rock solid platform and the Mac gives them that. They cost more than a PC running Linux but the price difference is tiny compared to the cost of time which could be wasted if the Linux machine doesn't work properly.

but if something bad happens you can trace it to a user and say "you did this" If they then say "no, but person X knows my password" then you can still get the culprit (and deal with the original user for passing on their details)

Further Education Teacher Job Profile should get you started. Good luck - FE can be an amazing place to work (I spent 10 years in an FE College)

I've been happy with Virgin broadband - been with them for quite a few years now and I think there's only been 1 fault in that time (they pushed out a modem update to all modems simultaneously and something went wrong which lead to an overnight outage). As @somabc says, they do traffic management but they are very clear about what and when - it's not like some companies which are not so up-front about it. I've got the "large" package and it seems to give a pretty solid 10Mbit download from places like Microsoft even at peak time.

Director of IT A very good school and what looks like a very good job.

Amazon.co.uk: usb print server: Computers & Accessories Quite a few USB print servers from about £20 If you've got a spare PC then you could use that as a print server but it feels like overkill (KISS applies :-))

Looks fine except for the cmdline1 bit - just delete the whole line: ObjShell.Run CMDLine1

Yes - but you need to take control of the download/install process. Start with Windows Update Agent API (Windows) - this gives an overview of what's possible and then look at the code on slides 44/45 of this presentation - http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/C/2/8C21BAFE-3432-48D1-962A-F7A9DD54A2AC/Best%20Practices%20in%20Architecting%20and%20Implementing%20Windows%20Server%20Update%20Services%20(WSUS).pptx The code will force a reboot if needed but you could easily change it so that it sends an email, writes a log or whatever when a server needs a restart.

Sorry; but that's nonsense! When I was a "young person" (admittedly a long time ago) people managed to do jobs that were outside the 9-5 range without needing to drive - they got buses, they walked, they cycled etc. Now I'm not saying that banning young people driving at night is a good idea but to suggest that it's nearly impossible to survive without driving at night is just as extreme!

Are you running this as a machine startup script?

I'm guessing line 53 is the "set oAccount" line If so, do you have on error resume next as the previous line (and not commented out - ie not starting with a ' mark)? Some accounts won't be found in the domain (they're local) so it's not possible to get a SID for them - this is a kludgy way of skipping over them (ie the error will happen but vbscript carries on running because you've said "carry on" if there's an error) and the error handler then says "if error code is not zero then I know the SID wasn't found so just use 0 as a dummy"

But like that, it's meaningless. How many managers does the BBC have? Does this represent 1% of its managers or 90%? What percentage of managers in (say) Tesco are on more than £100k? It's loads more money than I get but it doesn't meant to say it's wrong. What we should be looking at is why some people get paid so little even though they do a fantastic job rather than just dragging everyone down to the lowest possible salary (because that's where this looks like it's going - it won't be "well, we can take the money we saved on the top salaries and give a pay rise lower down")

Is there a reason not to give users a choice? (eg you're running Open Office and the license cost would be prohibitive) If you've got Office 2007 (or 2010) on the desktop I can't see a reason not to let users make use of it - by all means recommend OWA and suggest it as the primary email client because there is simplicity to having just 1 client. If you've got Office 2003 then I seem to remember that it doesn't autoconfigure (so users going to a "new" machine may have to set up Outlook which leads to support calls because they get it wrong! If this is the case, you can add a preferences file to Office which will tell it to use Exchange etc and that removes a lot of the problems.

What kind of machine? ie - is it managed by someone else? An administrators can configure a machine so that it can't be shutdown by a non-admin user. If you don't manage the computer you can't shutdown then that may be why. If, on the other hand, you're the administrator and you don't know why it's not letting you shut down then you've probably set the policy to prevent shutdown.

Alternatively, do you use iTunes to play the music (or could you?) the library contains the last played date for every file. It's an XML file so you could hack the data out of it fairly easily but there's also an iTunes API. There is an API for Windows Media Player but I've never found it easy to use (ie I've never actually managed to do anything worthwhile with it!)

One of the NTFS file properties is last accessed date - you could check that and if it's in the last 24 hours then copy the file to another location. the downside with this is that *any* access to the file (even listing its properties in Explorer) triggers an update (so if you open a folder to see what files are there and have it in the details view where it shows the file info then all the files there are flagged as accessed) Also, the last accessed date is not updated on Vista/Windows 7 by default (I'd guess because the info is not as useful as it might be) - you can turn it back on (fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 0 at a command prompt)

It does seem like a good idea but there's research (I think it was Ian Duncan Smith I heard talking about it most recently) that shows that if you take babies away from women like this then they simply get pregnant again. That is part of the real problem - we have people who don't think it's wrong for a child that age to smoke, drink and be wildly overweight. Education is the answer but I've no idea how you do it - as you say, there are plenty of people who go through school totally ignoring everything around them and learning nothing. They then become parents and the cycle repeats. The good news is that not all countries are like this so perhaps we can learn from the other countries which do seem more civilised.

I'm guessing that first section is the Christian singles dating site (or it's from the southern USA) None of my "easy" passwords is in there so I can relax!

Try this: Set oAccount = oWMIService.Get("Win32_UserAccount.Name='" & sUser & "',Domain='" & sDomain & "'") The _ should work as a line continuation character (and I copied and pasted from a working script, honest!) but is obviously not working ...

Assuming this is windows then you type something like: route add 10.0.0.0 mask 255.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 What that does is say that the route to get to network 10.0.0.0 with subnet 255.0.0.0 goes via gateway 192.168.0.1 You need to know the network/subnet that your phone system is on and your default gateway. Your gateway (router) also needs to be setup to route from your PC network to your phone network.

I can see the problem - it looks like they've taken the guards off the fan blades :-)

Just because you have a 1st class degree doesn't mean you'll make a brilliant teacher any more than having a third (or no degree at all) means you'll make a poor teacher. There's much, much more to it than that but it's always easy to just set a target ("all teachers will have at least a 2:2") rather than find out what really makes a good teacher (or good anything else for that matter - how many people with MCSE have no idea how a network really works??)

Last time I checked, Ohio was not in this country so this probably isn't the fault of social services :-) Even if it was in this country, it's not the fault of social services that a mother has no idea how to bring up her children. We read endless complaints about how the country is becoming a nanny state and yet the first reaction when something goes wrong seems to be that the nanny state doesn't do enough nannying! Somehow, this mother has got to the age when she can have a baby but has no idea how to bring up that baby. How did her parents allow that to happen? The death penalty wouldn't fix this any more than it would fix any other problem - there is no country in the world which uses the death penalty that has no crime. It's simply an easy reaction to say "let's kill someone who does something wrong"

OK; this might be a bit of over kill but this is how I clean up "dead" profiles. First line has a list of users where you don't want the profile to be cleared, all others are removed from disc and from the list in the registry. It also cleans out the profile list in the registry (so you don't get the problem you're seeing) If you set bdebug=true at the start then it writes a log to the "slog" folder. 'don't delete profiles for these local users sUsersToKeep=array("exam09","administrator","LocalService","NetworkService","All Users","Default User") bDebug=false 'set true to write to log file Const HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = &H80000002 dim sLog sLog="c:\windows\profileclean.log" set oUserNameDic=createobject("scripting.dictionary") set oUserSIDDic=createobject("scripting.dictionary") set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") set oFSO=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") Set oRegistry=GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\default:StdRegProv") set oNetwork=createobject("wscript.network") sComputer=oNetwork.computername debugout "Starting" BuildDictionaries ClearProfiles debugout "Ending" sub BuildDictionaries on error resume next for each sUser in sUsersToKeep sSid=GetSid(sComputer,sUser) if not oUserSIDDic.exists(sSID) then oUserSIDDic.add sSid, sUser end if oUserNameDic.add lcase(sUser),sSid debugout "Adding " & sUser next 'now add details for user running this script; don't want to delete profile for logged on user! sUser=lcase(oNetwork.username) sDomain=oShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%userdomain%") sSid=GetSid(sDomain,sUser) debugout "Process running as " & sDomain & "\" & sUser & "(SID: " & sSID & ")" if not oUserSIDDic.exists(sSid) then oUserSIDDic.add sSid, sUser end if if not oUserNameDic.exists(sUser) then oUserNameDic.add lcase(sUser),sSid debugout "Adding " & sUser end if on error goto 0 end sub Function GetSid(sDomain,sUser) 'sDomain could be domain or computer name but will only query local computer '. below means query local computer for info Set oWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\cimv2") on error resume next Set oAccount = oWMIService.Get _ ("Win32_UserAccount.Name='" & sUser & "',Domain='" & sDomain & "'") if err.number=0 then sSid=oAccount.SID else sSid=0 end if GetSid=sSid on error goto 0 end function sub ClearProfiles on error resume next sPath = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileGuid" lRC = oRegistry.EnumKey(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, sPath, sKeys) If (lRC = 0) And (Err.Number = 0) and not(isnull(sKeys)) Then ' no errors and there is something to look at For i=lbound(sKeys) to ubound(sKeys) lRc=oRegistry.GetStringValue(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,sPath &"\"& sKeys(i),"SidString",sValue) if CheckSid(sValue) or len(sValue)<40 then 'profile is in list to keep or is well known profile so do nothing else debugout "deleting reg key " & sPath & "\" & sKeys(i) deletesubkeys HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,sPath & "\" & sKeys(i) end if next end if sPath = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList" lRC = oRegistry.EnumKey(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, sPath, sKeys) If (lRC = 0) And (Err.Number = 0) and not(isnull(sKeys)) Then For i=lbound(sKeys) to ubound(sKeys) if CheckSid(sKeys(i)) then 'profile is in list to keep or is well known profile so do nothing else lRc=oRegistry.GetStringValue(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,sPath &"\"& sKeys(i),"ProfileImagePath",sValue) on error resume next if ofso.folderexists(sValue) then if lcase(sValue)<> lcase(oShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%USERPROFILE%")) then 'it's not "my" profile folder debugout "deleting folder " & sValue err.clear ofso.deletefolder sValue,true if err.number<>0 then debugout "Error " & err.number & " on delete" end if end if end if on error goto 0 deletesubkeys HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,sPath & "\" & sKeys(i) end if next end if root="c:\documents and settings" Set folder=oFSO.GetFolder(root) Set flist=folder.subfolders For Each oFolder In flist sFolderName=lcase(oFolder.name) iDotPos=instr(sFolderName,".") 'check to see if name is username.ic etc if iDotPos<>0 then sName=left(sFolderName,iDotPos-1) else sName=sFolderName end if If not CheckName(sName) then if lcase(root & "\" & sFoldername) <> lcase(oShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%USERPROFILE%")) then 'it's not "my" profile folder debugout "Deleting folder " & sFolderName deletefolder root & "\" & sFoldername end if End If Next on error goto 0 end sub Sub DeleteSubkeys(iRoot, sKeyPath) on error resume next oRegistry.EnumKey iRoot, sKeyPath, arrSubkeys If IsArray(arrSubkeys) Then For Each sSubkey In arrSubkeys DeleteSubkeys iRoot, sKeyPath & "\" & sSubkey Next End If oRegistry.DeleteKey iRoot, sKeyPath on error goto 0 End Sub function CheckSid(sSID) on error resume next 'is this SID in the dictionary to be preserved or is it a "well known" SID? if oUserSIDDic.exists(sSID) or len(sSID)<40 then CheckSID=true else CheckSID=false end if on error goto 0 end function function CheckName(sName) on error resume next 'is this username in the dictionary to be preserved if oUserNameDic.exists(lcase(sName)) then CheckName=true else CheckName=false end if end function sub debugout(sItem) on error resume next if bdebug then if not ofso.fileexists(sLog) then set oFile=ofso.createtextfile(sLog) ofile.writeline now & ": Starting" ofile.close end if set oFile=ofso.opentextfile(sLog,8) ofile.writeline now & ": " & sItem oFile.close end if on error goto 0 end sub Sub DeleteFolder(sRoot) on error resume next Set oFolder=oFso.getfolder(sRoot) For Each folder In oFolder.subfolders ClearContents(folder) Next ClearContents(oFolder) ofso.deletefolder sRoot on error goto 0 end sub Sub ClearContents(sFolder) on error resume next for each f1 in sFolder.files ofso.deletefile f1,true next For Each f2 In sFolder.subfolders ClearContents(f2) ofso.deletefolder f2,true Next on error goto 0 End Sub

Just after the last pope died a woman at my last college really did try backing up the internet onto floppy (well, kind of. She was convinced "someone" was going to try and remove all references to him from the web so she decided to download everything about him onto floppies. It tool quite a while; not quite sure what happened to her project in the end!)