srochford

Losing one DC shouldn't have that sort of effect on logon times - what's the remaining DC doing apart from authentication? Can you turn off other services on that DC to make the logon process faster (or is the actual "logon" bit quick but other "stuff" happens afterwards? if so, can that be removed temporarily?) Were the FSMO roles on the DC which has failed? If so, transfer them to your remaining DC (you'll have to force the transfer but that's fine and won't cause problems later) Is the remaining DC a global catalog? If not, make it a GC.

Might be cheaper to get an "ordinary" bean bag tray - just found these with a quick search but I'm sure there are others: Buy Beanbag Lap Trays Online - candh.co.uk If it's not big enough, just glue a bit of MDF on top and job done :-)

Relatively easy to query another PC to see who's logged in; only problem is that you need to be an admin on that machine to do it remotely. (Possibly not an admin but you need to be able to connect to WMI and by default I think only admins can do that). My thinking would be that the login script would fetch a web page from a server. That web page would then check the database - if it's clear then login proceeds. If it's showing the user may be logged on elsewhere then it would attempt to query the remote machine (web page can do this using admin level credentials) and if the user isn't logged on or the machine is down then again login proceeds.

For .docx files I think you will need to do: ftype word.document.12="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\WINWORD.EXE" /n /dde This should only affect the currently logged on user but I don't have a machine with Office 2003 to try this on at the moment.

The detect and repair will use the installer service. This can be triggered by any user but then runs in the system context so that you can do things like repairing software which is already installed.

Certainly the first to own up that you can't read a graph :-)

Defaults are normally set on a per-user basis so if you run something at logoff I think that it can only make changes for the user who is currently logging off. Is this so that you can double click on (say) a .DOC file and it opens in the correct version of Word? You could setup files called "Configure Office 2007" and "Configure Office 2003" and tell users to click them when they start working. The content would be a series of statements something like: ftype word.document.8="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\WINWORD.EXE" /n /dde ftype Excel.Sheet.8="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE" /e for Office 2007 and ftype word.document.8="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\WINWORD.EXE" /n /dde ftype Excel.Sheet.8="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\EXCEL.EXE" /e for Office 2003

Which is why it's so funny when people are so desperate to get rid of him and bring in a Conservative government - there's really not much difference between many of this government's policies and those which the Tories want (although, of course, as politicians they can't say that because they have to pretend that they are totally different!)

There's a raft of commercial support available for much open source software - certainly the big packages - so they shouldn't be able to use "no commercial support" as an excuse.

I think it's worth stepping back for a minute and asking "Why do I backup?" "What do I need to do with my backups?" For example, is it disaster recovery: I get into work in the morning and find there's been a fire/flood/burglary/whatever and all my servers are dead Is it "I've just deleted all my course work; please can you get back last night's backup?" Or, "I want to go back to the version of files I had 3 weeks ago - please can you help?" Can you use different backup techniques for different data sets? For example, if you say "we will only keep 1 week's worth of data for student home directories" then you could probably set up a box with a couple of 2Tb drives and use robocopy to copy to these. The benefit of that is that most of the data is static so once you've got a week's worth of backups in place, it takes much less time to do the backup each night because you're essentially doing a differential backup but with the benefit that the "Monday" folder holds all the files as they were on Monday so it's really quick to restore. If you can do something like this, then you free up your tape system to do things like the SQL databases which need to be kept for longer and can't be backed up with robocopy. You can configure your servers to backup system state to disc and then copy that off somewhere safe later - again, this might help spread the load. Of course, this won't work for everyone (if you've got nowhere safe to put a disc backup which is a fire-safe distance from your servers then there's no point!) but sometimes just thinking about a complete change can help find a solution.

Good to hear it's all sorted! What may be helpful as well as keeping an image is to start building a set of drivers, particularly if you've got quite a variety of machines. Make some space on a server and set up a folder "drivers" and under that put "network", "audio" and "video" folders. When you find you need to download drivers because they're not in Windows, stick the drivers in there. ideally, you want them unzipped and in the form where you can just browse to it when prompted for a driver (even the .exe files can often be unziipped with 7zip and you'll find a driver folder inside) You can then either connect to this over the network when you need drivers on a rebuilt machine or copy it all to a USB stick and load the drivers from there.

OK; often this is because the program thinks you have data in columns that are actually empty. To confirm this, can you try highlighting just the data you want and copying and pasting it into a new sheet. Save that as CSV and see what you get. the thing I've seen cause this before is if I've had stuff in (say) columns A-F and I then highlight columns E and F and press delete. This clears the content but leaves those 2 columns as part of the data set. When you export you get the extra commas because it hitnks that you want the empty cells (perfectly valid to have blank entries in lots of databases!)

Probably shouldn't say it, but isn't that one of the things that BSF ought to do? Not sure how you can ever have a career structure in a school which employs 1-2 people doing IT; there's just not enough scope for progression whereas if you have a company with thousands of employees then there ought to be scope. That doesn't mean that there shouldn't be training, of course there should be. It always grieves me that some educational instiutions are often so bad at educating their own staff (whatever their job title)

One other thing which might help here and will hopefully help other people with driver problems on HP/Compaq computers is HP Softpaq Manager - it seems to move around the web site but you should be able to find a download link with this: site:hp.com "Download HP SoftPaq Download Manager" - Google Search In an ideal world, you download it on your machine with missing drivers, it then works out what machine you've got and fetches and installs all the drivers for it. In a non-ideal world, you run it on a machine with network access, select the computer which needs drivers from the list and then let it search and manually download the drivers. You then stick the network driver on a USB stick etc and put it in the machine to be fixed. The other possibility is that for some reason the PC doesn't have the standard NIC - not terribly likely if it's onboard but more likely if it's a separate card. To find out what kind of card it is, right click it in device manager and go to properties and then details. In the property list, find details - it's a string like: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_4230 This tells you that the manufacturer is "8086" and the particular item is "4230" Now go to PCI Vendor and Device Lists and enter the 8086 in the Vendor Search box and search; do the same for the device search. You should now have a manufacturer and a model which generally gets you to the right download.

That's true, but connection speeds are improving all the time - there are loads of people on "up to 24Mbit" and quite a few on 50Mbit with Virgin. If you've got this sort of speed then you really need an N router to get the full benefit - you'll rarely get anywhere near 54Mbit on a G router and it would be daft to be paying Virgin for 50Mbit internet if you can then only get about half of that through your wireless network.

something like this? Not sure if you have a known list of PCs (this assumes you have an it's in a plain text file) or if you're going to query all PCs in an OU in AD or whatever but I hope this gets you started. 'what's the folder to look for sFolderName="Application Data\Maple\13" 'where do you want it copying to sDestination="\\cs-srochfor-01\tmp\" dim sComputers() dim iComputers icomputers=0 set oFSO=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") GetComputerList QueryComputers sub GetComputerList 'simple list of PCs; read it and store in array sList="c:\temp\pcs.txt" set oFile=ofso.opentextfile(sList) do while not oFile.atendofstream sComputer=oFile.readline iComputers=iComputers + 1 redim preserve sComputers(iComputers) sComputers(iComputers)=sComputer loop oFile.close end sub sub QueryComputers for each sComputer in sComputers if sComputer<>"" then 'get the root of D&S sPath="\\" & sComputer & "\c$\documents and settings\" set oFolder=ofso.getfolder(sPath) for each oSubFolder in oFolder.subfolders 'look at each user folder if ofso.folderexists(sPath & oSubFolder.Name & "\" & sFolderName) then 'the folder we want exists so make a suitable folder on the destination machine - first for computer if not ofso.folderexists(sDestination & sComputer) then ofso.createfolder sDestination & sComputer 'and now for user if not ofso.folderexists(sDestination & sComputer & "\" & oSubFolder.Name) then ofso.createfolder sDestination & sComputer & "\" & oSubFolder.Name 'copy everything ofso.copyfolder sPath & oSubFolder.Name & "\" & sFolderName,sDestination & sComputer & "\" & oSubFolder.Name & "\" end if next end if next end sub

Is it currently working at all? If so, go into computer management and look at the disc setup - that will tell you if it's a RAID array. You can make the slipstreamed install but it takes time; if you just want to get the machine installed quickly then go into the BIOS and find the SATA settings - you want to make sure it doesn't say AHCI; the option is probably something like "standard" If you can set it like that, then you won't need any drivers. It will be fractionally slower but it's unlikely it will affect most users.

Can you post an example of what you mean? Are you getting extra commas at the end of each line or commas duplicated eg cat,dog,fish,snake,,, or cat,,dog,,fish,,snake or something completely different?

I think it needs escaping: mount_smbfs //$usrname@[server]/$usrname$ /Users/$usrname/Desktop/School\ Home Alternatively, just leave out the space altogether - it will make life easier (I wish I could just disable the space bar for file and folder names :-))

Is the person who put exposed cat 5 cable on the roof still alive ???

It's also $10.50 "per user session" according to the review you've quoted - that's quite a lot of money for most schools (see elsewhere the "no money for next year" thread.

It's all part of user access control. If you open a command prompt and try to change into that folder you'll get "access denied" as you've seen. If you right click on the command prompt icon and choose "run as administrator" then you'll be able to change into that folder - you're now using your admin rights and it all works as expected

Do you record who logs on where? If not, why not - it's really useful to have that info and you'll find loads of threads here with info on how to do it. Once you've got that, collect the info and parse it every day to find any user who was logged on to more than 2 machines at the same time. Pass that info to form teacher, head of year, whatever and get them to deal with it. You can spend a long time trying to find ways to do this; none of them is perfect, all of them will cause grief in various ways (not least the bullying that will be triggered as kids who "need" another logon will beat up a weaker child to get their logon details)

For the benefit of others who might find this, there are various possibilities I can think of. Easiest is probably to set permissions on the printer queue to allow a particular group to print and then add the relevant users to that group (note you need to add users, not computers - the print job takes place in the security context of the user, not the printer no matter how you configure the printer connection. Many printers allow you to specify a range of IP addresses which can print to the printer. If yours does this then set up a suitable allow range and make sure the PCs you want get those IP addresses (reservations based on the MAC address in your DHCP server) If the printer is plugged into the network then make sure that users can't print directly to it (they shouldn't be able to create a local TCP/IP port to do this in the normal Windows way but I don't know what a clever user could do - eg many printers will accept an FTP connection to print a file; make sure you turn that off!)

it's also a problem if a machine crashes and the user needs to logon to another machine (or possibly even the same machine!) It's another problem where you can look for technical solutions but it's really a people problem so it needs a people solution.