srochford

I think this is what the lawyers call a "non-sequitur" - ie just because the ISP can detect particular kinds of traffic does not mean it can detect and block all kinds of traffic. Given that very many people with current virus scanners can't detect some viruses I suspect there's little hope of any ISP being able to block the bad guys. That doesn't mean that they couldn't do more than they do but I don't think you'd have much chance of winning a law suit against your ISP because they let viruses through but please don't let that stop you - I reckon you could make some lawyers very rich while you try :-)

Looks like you're trying to unmap a drive which isn't currently mapped. The "tidy" way to fix that is to enumerate network drives and only unmap if they're not already mapped. The way to get it working now is to stick "on error resume next" before the unmap section - the error will happen but no-one will see and this buys you time to fix things properly. The other thing to do is to make sure your login scripts run with cscript (rather than wscript which is what you are using) the benefit of this is that error messages etc are not done in message boxes (which confuse users and need "OK" clicking) but just written to the console (where users will ignore them but everything will just work :-))

Do you have WINS configured? Is so, is it working OK (take a look in the WINS management console to see what computers are registered) As @Dan40007 says, network browsing can use broadcast stuff but if WINS is working then the client should contact the master browser to get a list of computers. WINS is not totally reliable - it's possible for random machines to elect themselves as master and if that happens then they won't know what machines are out there and you won't see the right results.

Oh yes it is :-) You don't need Server 2008 to use GPP - you just need server 2003. The confusion comes about because it wasn't introduced until Server 2008 and you can't manage it unless you've got at least one machine with Server 2008, Vista or Windows 7.

I wonder if I should link this to the other thread where teachers are being criticised for wanting to pirate software? Looks like other people are just as bad at stealing music!

Is it creating/updating thumbnails as the user logs in? No idea why it should be but I know the thumbnailing can slow things down. Going from cat5 to cat6 shouldn't make any difference if the switches are the same (but if your cat6 is gigabit compared to 100Mbit on the cat5 then that's the significant difference!)

OK; looks like somehow the .vbs file isn't associated with cscript or wscript which is why it's saying "what do you want to open it with" That needs to be fixed but maybe on another day :-) For now, can you change the machine startup script so instead of saying "addfonts.vbs" it says "cscript addfonts.vbs" and see what that does.

OK; Plan B - let's add some debugging! This is going to create a log file at c:\windows\temp\fonts.log and (hopefully!) write some info to the log file. Let the script run and collect that log file and post its contents; I hope that might show what's going on ... Const FONTS = &H14 dim oFSO,oShell, oFolder1, oFolder2, sRoot sRoot="\\dcserver01\Shared Resources\fonts\" Set oShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application") set oFSO= CreateObject("scripting.filesystemobject") set oLog=ofso.createtextfile("c:\windows\temp\fonts.log",true) Set oFolder1 = oShell.Namespace(FONTS) oLog.writeline oFolder1.name set oFolder2=ofso.getfolder(sRoot) oLog.writeline oFolder2.name for each oFile in oFolder2.files sName=lcase(oFile.name) oLog.writeline sName if right(sName,4)=".ttf" then oLog.wrietline "Font found" if not ofso.fileexists(oFolder1.self.path & "\" & sName) then oLog.writeline "Not installed yet" oFolder1.copyhere sRoot & sName oLog.writeline sRoot & sName end if end if next oLog.close

it depends on which version of server software you're running. Server 2003 R2 and later have the File Server Resource Manager which is more flexible - Quota Management There are also third party tools (eg - WinQuota Software - Flexible Solutions for Windows Administration) which will impose a quota on any directory. With NAS boxes I'm not sure what you could do - it would depend on how much control you had over the OS but if you can run scripts on it then you could do something which ran (say) once an hour to check for folder sizes and if limits were exceeded it turned off the ability to create new files.

All in favour of using that 0% tax to fund a £0 salary for IT Staff say "aye" - perhaps not such a big rush to throw away the money that pays our wages :-)

You could comment out that first line and then also comment out the lines beginning "sub" and "end sub" to make it a standalone script (as Gerry has shown) The benefit of doing it as Witch has shown is that when the script grows you can keep the logic clear (so you have have an "installfonts" "installNewFlashPlayer" "AddPrinter" "UpdateVirusScanner" etc etc)

I might be missing something, but why not just impose quotas? That way, users have to decide what to do - you can give them guidance as to how to make their files smaller but they have to take responsibility. @elsiegee's method of checking through folders is good for a small school but won't work for an average secondary school or larger - there are just too many folders so you need an automatic process. Using any of the mentioned tools to automate file size shrinking will work but you run the risk of destroying important work. Of course, most of the pictures taken and saved on the network are rubbish (to be kind) and shrinking them won't lose anything but I'd be surprised if there were no users taking good photos at high res which they need to look like that. @gshaw's comment about the price of disc storage is correct - high speed storage is very expensive compared to USB SATA drives - but there's no reason you can't do some kind of hierarchical storage. Not really worked out details of how to do this but I would imagine that you could move bitmaps older than (say) 1 year onto an external drive. If you do this once a month you could keep all these files for a year. If someone says "I need the files back from 12 months ago" you can quickly move them back to live storage. If they don't ask for them for a year after they were archived then you can safely delete.

The GUI method in Word is good if it's your document and you've only got 1 or 2 of them - I should have made the point that the script was for when you're running a network which has hundreds or thousands of DOC files containing images which need compressing. The automation in this case is vital if you're going to get the job done in a sensible time!

Legally, I think you'd probably be OK - as I understand it, what you have to avoid is "passing off" - trying to pretend that you in some way represent or are part of the organisation whose name you're using in part. Whether you'd get pressed not to use the name could be another matter. The best example is probably Rolls Royce - they actively pursue people who use terms like "We are the Rolls Royce of XXX" even though the company is obviously nothing to do with Rolls (eg you can't call yourself "the Rolls Royce of IT Support") I'd guess the best thing to do would be to talk to the communications department at the university concerned to see if they have any objection to their name being used in this way; if they're happy then go ahead. If they're not happy, then think of another name.

I think this is distorted because presumably "Apple" includes every visit to an Apple site (so iPods and iPhones as well as computers); Dell and HP are just going to get computer visits in the main, not having any mass market computer products. I was intrigued by the near identical numbers for Picasa and Flickr - I often think I'm the only person using Picasa because so many seem to use Flickr.

Sorry; should have added that much :-) Save it as (say) convert.vbs (change the path, and number of days at the top if you want different values) You need to have Office 2007 installed on the machine where you're going to run it Open a command prompt and type: cscript convert.vbs and wait for it to run; you'll see it showing a list of filenames as it works. What I would suggest you do the first time is to put a couple of existing Word files in c:\temp and let it run on that folder. Once you're confident it does what you expect then point it at a server folder.

Thought I'd posted this before but I can't find it so I've written a blog post - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/blogs/srochford/278-making-word-files-smaller.html It's just a script that will search a directory tree for .DOC files which are bigger than a specified size and older than a specified age. Those it finds, it will resave as .DOCX, regaining lots and lots of space :-)

A common problem with Word documents is that people include bitmap images. This can mean that a page with a small amount of text that ought to be no more than a few kilobytes actually takes up megabytes of space. You can try and persuade people not to do this but sometimes it's easier to just compress the files for them. Fortunately, Microsoft make this easy - Office 2007 introduced the .docx format which essentially zips up the document. If it has a bitmap in it, this will normally make the file much, much smaller. Even if users are working with Office 2003 or Office XP they'll still be able to edit the files as long as they have the file format converters installed - you can push these out with WSUS if that's not already been done. The script below will trawl through a directory tree and check for .doc files greater than a certain size and older than a given date. If it finds them, it opens the file in Word, resaves it as .docx and once that's safely done, deletes the original file. 'this is the folder to process sFolder="T:\PDSU" 'files newer than this number of days won't be changed iDays=30 dim oWord Const wdFormatDocumentDefault = 16 Const Megabyte=1000000 set oFSO=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") ProcessFolder sFolder Sub Processfolder(sFolder) wscript.echo sFolder set oFolder=ofso.getfolder(sFolder) set oTopFolder=oFolder.parentfolder sTopFolder=oTopFolder.path for each oFile in oFolder.files if oFile.size > 2 * Megabyte then if datediff("d",oFile.datelastmodified,now)>iDays then if ucase(ofso.GetExtensionName(oFile))="DOC" then sBase=oFSO.GetBaseName(oFile) Doc2DocX sFolder,sBase end if end if end if next for each oSubFolder in oFolder.subfolders ProcessFolder sFolder & "\" & oSubFolder.name next end sub Sub Doc2DocX( sFolder, sFile ) ' Build the fully qualified DOCX file name sOutputFile = sFolder & "\" & sFile & ".docx" sInputFile = sFolder & "\" & sFile & ".doc" ' Create a Word object Set oWord = CreateObject( "Word.Application" ) With oWord ' True: make Word visible; False: invisible - makes it faster becaus no screen redraw .Visible = false ' Open the Word document .Documents.Open sInputFile ' Make the opened file the active document Set oDoc = .ActiveDocument ' Save as DOCX oDoc.SaveAs sOutputFile, wdFormatDocumentDefault wscript.echo sOutputFile ' Close the active document oDoc.Close 'quit Word .quit End With if ofso.fileexists(sOutputFile) then wscript.sleep 1000 'wait for Word to close ofso.deletefile sInputFile,true end if End Sub

A dictionary that shows the difference between fiance and fiancee :-)

I've never used a drive like this so this is probably a bit vague. Boot off the BartPE disc and go into device manager - you should be able to see some kind of storage controller in the list of unrecognised devices. Take a note of its device ID string (the bit that goes something like PCI\VEN_1234&5678&SUBSYS ) You now need to find the driver for that - go to pcidatabase.com and look up the vendor code and device code; this should tell you what the controller is. Now try and get the drivers for it. You can either try and get them from the manufacturer site or you can look in the C: drive on the NAS - have a look in the windows\inf folder. I've not use XP Embedded so I don't know if it's the same as Windows normally but if it is then you should find some OEM*.inf files; look at each of them to see if they are the file for your controller. Once you've found the inf file, you should be able to read the contents and see the .sys file (and maybe others) which it uses. If you can get those then you might be able to load them into BartPE (the web site has details of how to add extra drivers) Having done all this, you ought to be able to see the discs; if you're lucky, the data will be written in a form that you can read but it may not be - the fact that you're saying it's a 2Tb device with 4 x 500Gb discs means that the data is presumably just striped across all the discs. This is effective in that it doesn't waste space but it also means that if 1 disc fails you could lose the lot.

If staff are keeping every email and you're only up to 1Gb then you should count yourself lucky :-) We have people with 4Gb in their Exchange mailbox and goodness knows what in PST files, mbox files and other random mail stores. We are starting to implement Symantec Enterprise Vault - this basically extracts messages older than a defined limit and stores them on a file server. It replaces them with a stub in Exchange; if you use Outlook, Entourage or OWA in Internet Explorer then there's a button on each archived message to allow you to retrieve the message. On the whole it works well (as long as you don't use Firefox, Thunderbird, Pine or any of the other mail clients which are common in Universities) but the huge stumbling block is that email older than (say) 10 years will be deleted. This just isn't going to happen - we have people threatening to take us to court if we delete their email. Some of this is just bluster but some is genuine; some people really do need email pretty much forever. The trouble is, they don't sort the "meet you for lunch in 10" emails from the critical stuff!! I love email; I don't know how we ever managed without it but sometimes I wish we could just make it all go away ...

Not sure about errors but I really like that! One thing which looks weird (but is right) is the way the bits of the A1(M) don't join up. I think Beck was brilliant - it's such a simple idea to make a map like this but no-one before him though of it and even today not all major cities use maps like this for their transport systems.

I'm happy with my bank as well :-) Firstly, they're called Smile - how can that not make you happy - and secondly they work in a "poo powered pyramid" (why smile?: where is smile) which is just fantastic (it's also quite a nice building in Stockport)

Netbeans

You might be able to buy it but not sure if you'll be able to run it - I think there are already manufacturers who aren't bringing out drivers for XP and that's not going to improve. There's no panic to go to Windows 7 tomorrow but I think everyone should be making plans for retiring XP over the next couple of years (either "big bang" move to 7 if the hardware currently in place can handle it or trickling in as new equipment arrives)