srochford

This is a post working in the monitoring team to make sure that all the stuff we provide centrally is available when it needs to be available. https://www4.ad.ic.ac.uk/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?akRegionCode=IRC_VIS_VAC_DISPLAY_PAGE&akRegionApplicationId=800&OASF=IRC_VIS_VAC_DISPLAY&OAHP=IRC_EXT_SITE_VISITOR_APPL&transactionid=410677654&retainAM=Y&addBreadCrumb=RP&p_svid=34287&p_spid=1528116&oapc=13&oas=OWNesPxL2kl7pAsLFhXUXg.. I still have no confidence is a URL like that; if it doesn't work, go to Employment and follow "Job search for applicants not currently employed by Imperial College staff" and then look at Professional Area "Information Communication Technology" Feel free to email [email protected] if you have any questions.

We have 3 vacancies for IT Support staff. Details here: https://www4.ad.ic.ac.uk/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?akRegionCode=IRC_VIS_VAC_DISPLAY_PAGE&akRegionApplicationId=800&transactionid=120675185&retainAM=Y&addBreadCrumb=S&p_svid=33604&p_spid=1512115&oapc=16&oas=ZN6eHpQ2mz-w2IGHlyCMSA.. There's a chance that that stupidly long URL won't work - if so, go to Employment and follow "Job search for applicants not currently employed by Imperial College staff" and then look at Professional Area "Information Communication Technology" The jobs are in the faculty support teams - providing desktop support to staff and students in one part of the College (eg my team provides support to all Maths and Physics users) Unlike some universities, Imperial's ICT is provided centrally to all departments - all general purpose networking and all file, mail, web, database servers etc are all provided by ICT and looked after by ICT centrally. If what you want to do is manage servers and hide in a cupboard without user contact then this is not the job for you. If, however, you want to work in an environment where you really do get to support world leading science and deal with a huge range of different people and their ICT needs and problems then this might be for you. As you might expect, there's a wide range of software and hardware in use (standard desktop OS range is x64 Windows 7, Red Hat 6, Fedora 16, Ubuntu 11.04and Mac OS X Lion but actually you could easily find any OS on a machine and that machine might be HP or Apple or could be just about anything) There are about 21,000 people at Imperial which equates to 40,000 users in our Active Directory and over 100,000 devices registered on our wired network. Some users would see 3 Gigabytes as a lot of data; others are struggling to keep their data in 3 Petabytes of storage! Note that there are 2 salary scales; you would normally expect to start on a 3a (£27,400) but most people progress to 3b once they've demonstrated that they are doing the job at a satisfactory level. If you want to ask about this feel free to email me - [email protected]

This is what I love about edugeek - the sheer bile and hatred that pours out over the most trivial of things. I don't know the old women concerned but I've known other old people who pretty much say random things which can come across as being offensive or intrusive and are best dealt with by offering them a cup of tea and a biscuit to distract them. I could of course be completely wrong and maybe this woman is a complete psycho about to take an axe to the OP but wouldn't it be nice to give her the benefit of the doubt? (Oh, no - I'd guess not; this is Edugeek after all!)

I'd change that to "difficult to do this at the moment" - one thing stopping it being practical is the lack of secure, high speed bandwidth into schools. Fix that and moving the data out of the school becomes more feasible (In real terms, schools have tiny amounts of data!) Just as an example, we have dual 10Gbit/s links to the internet; brought into different parts of London and then routed via private circuits so that we can survive someone digging up the road. I'd guess schools now are where universities were about 10-20 years ago. You still might not move file storage out of the school but it could become possible once schools have (say) dual gigabit links. You then just pay someone else to manage the storage. Would it be better value than doing it yourself? No idea :-) but it could be - you should get economies of scale in managing all of it. Will you get a better service than doing it yourself? Again, no idea but that would certainly be something to check very carefully.

Thanks for that. I've signed up to see what they actually offer - I suspect that you can get a free introductory training course and then you pay for the rest but perhaps I'm being unduly cynical :-)

Pretty much all technical terms can be abused by vendors and marketing people :-) Your single exchange server is definitely not in the cloud because there's only one - I'd say a key feature of cloud systems is that there are multiple servers providing any service. As@danbuntu says, this allows for redundancy and gives the possibility of the magical 100% uptime figure. I'm sure that some companies will offer "cloud hosting" or whatever marketing term is popular today to mean nothing more than putting your services in their datacentre - it's kind of in the cloud (it's not in your datacentre and it's on the internet) but it doesn't give the sort of benefit you would want. Proper cloud stuff ought to mean that you connect to the resource via the internet and you don't have to worry about where it is or what specific machine it's hosted on - their infrastructure will take care of shifting stuff around so that you continue to get availability. Of course the vagueness of the cloud can lead to problems - if you care about where your data is stored then you might not want it hosting on servers in a particular country - in the EU, for example, you probably want to make sure that your data stays in the EU and doesn't get migrated to the US just because there's spare capacity on their systems. There's a bit about this here Microsoft « Digital Agenda Commissioner – Neelie Kroes - I'm sure Microsoft now have a service for EU countries which guarantees that data stays in the EU (but, sadly, I can't find it today) Anyway, there are no clouds today, the sun is shining so it's time to switch off the computers and go outside :-)

Programming was pretty much taken out of all GCSE qualifications a good few years ago but there are moves to bring it back. A quick search finds that OCR are offering a new GCSE which does involve programming - OCR > Qualifications > By type > GCSE (from 2010) > ICT and Technology > Computing (Pilot) It's a pilot at the moment but I think anyone can be entered for it. As @LosOjos says, most teachers can't do programming (most people can't do programming and that includes quite a few people who are paid to do it!) so I suspect it won't get a huge take up. I got into IT because 35 years ago (!!!) I had to do some programming as part of my degree and found the whole thing absolutely fascinating. Sadly, this isn't true for most people - they just can't understand even the basics of programming. I doubt that you can change this; it's a bit like the fact that most people can't paint or compose music - I'd guess the brain is either wired that way or it isn't!

What kind of disc have you got for the database? Is anything else on the server? What does performance monitor tell you? (look at things like the disk queue length) The full SQL server lets you use more RAM (1Gb limit on Express) so if you're running out of RAM then the full version will take advantage of what you've got without having to put in more RAM but if the disc is the bottleneck (and it often is!) then changing to full SQL or adding more RAM will be just throwing money away.

In this support article You cannot set the date, time, or time zone on your computer Microsoft say "By default, only administrators and power users can change the date, time, or time zone." If net time /set is working for you then at some point you (or someone else) has given ordinary users the right to change the system time. This is potentially dangerous - if the time is changed on a machine by more than 5 minutes relative to the DCs then Kerberos authentication will fail (and the login script can't fix it because you won't be able to login!)

You just know that the sort of people who do this would end up stealing VM fibre and having a difficult job trying to sell it to the scrap metal merchant :-)

Apologies if you misunderstood what I wrote - I didn't say anything about blanking the screen! You're talking about "playing around with code" but, ultimately, your code has to call functions built into the OS and scripts can do that just as well - scripting *is* programming. If you start using Powershell rather than VBScript you've got access to pretty much anything you could do "in code" - it just might run a bit more slowly. This means that you wouldn't write a 3D game in VBScript or Powershell but a utility type program which is executed only once per session doesn't need to run at top speed. To be honest, I don't really know why you want to blank the screen rather than lock the computer. If the intention is to stop people unplugging the network cable then locking the computer when the cable is unplugged seems a pretty good way of doing that - you can't play games or do anything else "off task" when the computer is locked!

No idea :-) How would you do it from C/VB.Net, whatever? One thing that comes to mind is that you could have a theme with all colours set to black (or all white or whatever) and just set that. Is There a Silent Command-Line Operation to change theme? - Windows 7 Forums has a vbscript which will change theme; in the example it just uses one of the existing themes but I'm sure you could create an "all black" theme to use.

The beauty of vbscript (and other scripting languages) is that they can all functions in the OS which do everything you want - in this case it's just using rundll to do the actual locking and using WMI to monitor what's going on. Doing this gives you just as much power as any language. What you typically don't get is speed (every command is interpreted every time it's executed) but that just doesn't matter for a job like this.

I've added a bit at http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/73182-deterring-kids-unplugging-network-cables-5.html#post659654 which I hope clarifies what's needed. @Steve21 - not sure what you mean by "a bit over script"??

The code below is written in vbscript. The lines in between the rows of asterisks are examples - repalce them with the folders you want to clean. It will delete everything in (eg) d:\home\user1 but leave d:\home\user1 alone set ofso=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") '*********************** delfolder "d:\home\user1" delfolder "d:\home\user2" '*********************** Sub delfolder(x) dim oFolder if ofso.folderexists(x) then set oFolder=ofso.getfolder(x) for each oSubFolder in oFolder.subfolders ofso.deletefolder oSubfolder,true next for each oFile in oFolder.files oFSO.deletefile oFile,true next end if End Sub

And that's why it's turned off by default - it doesn't really give you any useful info (it will be affected by backup software, scheduled virus scans, anything reading the file properties and so on) I don't think there's any good way you can get this data - what you want is something which records when a file was last accessed by a genuine user and not by a server side process. File auditing can give you this but not in any nice way (I think!)

I know that split DNS can be useful (so if you query my public facing DNS you only see the records I want you to see and you don't see the details of my internal servers) but why else is it needed? (I've worked in places which do split and don't split and have good reasons for that so I'd guess I'm wondering why you're so definite that you should split)

I think you're misunderstanding (unless I've got it completely wrong!) The person who comes third (or anywhere else) has no effect at all if the person who comes first gets more than 50% of the vote. If no-one gets more than 50% of the vote then you look at the votes of the people who voted for the loser and (effectively) say "you can't have your candidate so who's your second choice" and you add those votes on to the other candidates. Depending on how close the vote is you may now get a winner or, if there are a lot of candidates, you might have to eliminate the next to the bottom candidate and re-allocate their votes. What you end up with is a system where the winner was actively voted for by a majority (even if he was second or third choice). At the moment, you might say "Well, I really want Lib Dem but if I can't have them then I'd like Conservative" but your second choice gets ignored. At the moment, roughly two thirds of MPs are elected with less than 50% of their constituents voting for them. Now it may be that this is fine (I vote Tory; I get a Labour MP but I'm happy with that because the Labour MP was my second choice). With this system we get a better chance to know what people actually want (even if it is second choice)

And there's also 3D Radio, LLC (which is nothing really to do with the spatial quality of the sound!)

Welcome to Edugeek - it's the way it works!

Not sure how to do this for Publisher - even Publisher 2010 doesn't seem to compress images when it saves - but powerpoint from at least 2007 seems to compress the images by default (my test image is 4Mb iSaving this n a .doc file gives a 5Mb document but .docx drops to just 600kb. The pptx file is just over 1.1Mb but the ppt file is only a fraction larger. It's got to be possible to script a process that opens a .pub file, selects each image in turn, selects "compress image" and then saves the result - it's not as good as the compression in Word but the defaults do shrink by about 50% which is better than nothing!

While we're on fun shapes for text, take a look at text-align: centaur; (but note that it won't work with Internet Explorer and is poor on Firefox but fine on Safari and Chrome!)

Slightly off topic, but our service desk now has its own page - ICT Service Desk | Facebook Do feel free to become a fan :-)

We're in the very early stages of looking at this but we're a university where almost every student already does bring their own computer - providing a farm of VDI machines for them to connect to would mean we could probably give students access to all the licensed software without them installing it (with all the licensing nightmares that brings) The benefits are that we save on all the costs of the desktop PCs; we've already got power and data sockets where students could plug in their laptops. I could imagine doing something similar for staff - again, there's a cost saving on hardware (and if you go the way some corporates do and expect people to look after their own machine then you save even more money!) In a school, however, this could be a nightmare for all the reasons @elsieegee40 raises.

So this is a real industry leader you've moved to now :-) Long time since I saw Banyan Vines; hope you're tending it nicely!