srochford

I sometimes get the feeling that there's a weird snobbishness about network equipment. In the past I've tried to get Cisco, HP and 3Com to explain why their switches are better than (say) DLink or Netgear and they never seem able to do it. Obviously the cheap 5 port "home" switches are no match for a managed ProCurve but if you're comparing layer 3 managed switches from (say) Netgear with those from HP the list of specs look pretty similar but the Netgear are cheaper. What do you get for all that extra money???

The other exciting thing you can do with a dewar of liquid nitrogen is put a damp cork in the top. If there's enough moisture, it will freeze to the top. You've then got a sealed unit with nitrogen slowly boiling and the pressure building up. Before long, it goes bang in a quite spectacular fashion. Kids: don't try this at home :-)

The Virgin seat reservation system is a nightmare - I'd say it fails to work at least half the time. In general, if the train is not busy, it's no big deal - you just sit anywhere - but if the train is full then they either announce that you can sit in first class or people just do it anyway.

You haven't said where you're trying to deploy this. If it's as a script, it needs to be as a computer startup script (not user logon; they won't have rights to run it). If it's a GPO to do software deployment then again, it needs to be at machine level.

Just for info, Netgear as a company uses its own switches to run its own network - they're not just domestic, low spec systems (although they do make cheap and cheerful for home use)

If it's not too late, do check out [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2FX9rviEhw]YouTube - Extreme Sheep LED Art[/ame] from Samsung :-)

I would hope you would get support for doing it but why would you need them all for the entire summer? Why not ask groups of people to bring them in at intervals? Surely that makes your life easier (you get them in batches that you can image easily) and you're not buried under a mountain of machines?

Data protection act does apply to hard copies; you absolutely must get consent before you do this. The school I used to work had a field in the database effectively saying "address not for publication" so it's quite easy to just print those who are happy to share their info. You've almost certainly got some children where there are court orders preventing access by one or both parents - you could end up not just possibly breaching some bit of the DPA but being directly in contempt of court!

if you've got a list of your MAC addresses then you could set up reservations for all of them - it's scriptable so you don't have to type them all in :-) One other thing I've read about but never really used is IPSec - you can configure a group policy to say "always use IPSec". Any non-domain PC won't do this so won't be able to talk to the network.

They are very big on outsourcing everything they can in order to "cut costs" (ie make people unemployed or pay them less) so that will be the driver here. I live in the borough and I can tell you that the council is very proud of the fact that they've cut council tax. What they say less about is that they've increased the cost of pretty much everything else (I think total spend increased last year by about 5% but I can't find the info on the web site - it was circulated to residents a couple of months ago.)

Worth talking to Brightcode - BrightCode, Web Design, E-Commerce, SEO, IT Support :: BrightCode They've done other schools; they can work fast and they won't rip you off :-)

I spent 3 solid days doing the foundation course - it's pretty easy but I don't really know how long it takes to get past that. Much of it seems to be about learning to use words in the way ITIL means them rather than the real world (but don't say that to your trainer; it could cause a heart attack :-))

The photo shoot was for Vogue magazine - I don't think most people would expect its photographers to be paedophiles!

Some of it's on the mark (schools could save some money by using more open source) but some of it's just way off and the attacking tone puts me off. Some of it's just not believable - to save billions of pounds on software you'd have to scrap all non open source. I don't think that's a realistic aim and even if you could do it, would you really save billions? (I think there used to be about 6,000 secondary schools and about 20,000 primaries in the UK. To save even £2 billion would mean you'd need savings of more than £100,000 per secondary and £30,000 per primary - seems a bit improbable!) He also talks about replacing 400W desktop machines with 20W units. I'm guessing he's intending to put in thin clients which is often a good idea but, again, the numbers don't add up. How many people are actually running machines drawing 400W? Yes, you might get a thin client at 20W but don't forget the servers needed to run it - they're not free and they also use power. A bit more honesty would make the whole thing believable. As it is, he comes across like a politician telling a bunch of half truths and it just means I mistrust the whole thing.

Wow! I'd guess if this is a last resort, then it's worth trying but 175C is way about the safe storage temperature for most electronic components so I'd not want to do it if I thought there was another possibility.

Can I just throw a spanner in the works and say you might want to think about going at it the other way? What folders have I got? Who should have access to them? How do I make that happen? If you've got a list of who owns what then you can simply run a script every night to make sure that the permissions are set like that. I know that might be dream world type territory but it's really easy to do "folder X is owned by user Y who manages group Z and group Z has rights on the folder"

If this is the Dell OEM XP then it may not need the XP key - I think it will be a BIOS locked version that should complete setup without asking for a key.

Are you running a domain? If so, you need to find out what policies will allow whatever it is you want to happen and then configure them - the existing users will then get updated. if you have a domain but you're not sure about group policies then get the new profile right, put it in netlogon in a folder called "default user" and wipe the existing user profiles - at next logon, they will take the default from the server. If you're not running a domain, then you can just get a user profile "right", put it in place on each machine in the "default user" folder and delete existing profiles (but beware of losing data!!) If data loss is an issue (and it probably is if you don't have a domain - where are user files?) then you could just overwrite ntuser.dat in any user profile folder.

subinacl (resource kit tool) can do this. Assuming you've got something like d:\users\ then you can do: d: cd \users for /d %i in (*) do subinacl.exe /subdirectories "%i" /setowner="%i" The loop will step through each directory and set the owner to be the same name (so directory steve gets owner steve and so on) Note that this could take some time if you've got lots of files. if you're using Windows quotas then turn them off while you do this - if any user is over quota then the update process will fail (as you change ownership, the quota count increases. If you try going over the limit then the owner won't get updated but you end up in an inconsistent state)

I think there are plenty of heads who are very careful with the money - they've only got a certain amount of it to spend so if they spend £35k on a copier contract then they've got less to spend on computers or other equipment. If a school has a good bursar/business manager or whatever then things should be better but not all schools seem to do that and they're more of a target for being ripped off (and it's worth remembering that that is what's happening - no-one selling a copier at £35k to a school is doing it because they think it's the best deal; they're doing it because they're crooks - and note, that in the "private v public" argument, the crooks are generally private sector companies!) Sadly, the "multiple quotes" doesn't always help - one of the other stories in the news this week (eg Builders fined £129m for rigging contract bids - Business News, Business - The Independent but the story was all over the news). If you have a group of companies determined to rip you off and you don't really know what something is worth then you're going to lose out. I can't find details of what was actually included in the case of the photocopier but if the school was told that they were paying for the copier plus all costs for (say) 5 years then it might have seemed OK, particularly if they were escaping from an even worse contract (and there are some really bad deals out there in the world of copiers)

Don't think you're making it up but it's not safe to assume that you'll get all caps, all lower case etc. What I always do is something like this: sGroup=ucase(objgroups.name) select case sGroup case "YEAR 1" ... end select That way, you're sure that you're working with upper case even if something in the underlying provider changes

Are there any database triggers? Can't see any reason why changing from + to - works but the other way doesn't - it's got to involve much the same amount of processing but if there's a trigger which is looking at the change in value and "doing something" then maybe that's failing??

Could you just leave out the whole disclaimer instead - it really would make the world a better place :-)

With Exchange server you can have an event sink - this is basically a script that runs when an event happens on the server. The MS support page How to register a transport event sink for the SMTP Service in Exchange 2000 Server gives an example of how you can check messages as they arrive at the server - the action it takes is not what you want but it shows how to process an attachment. It shouldn't be too hard to make it put the attachment in a specific folder when the recipient address is the one you want.

I think you've got to do something even if it's not 100% successful. Could you setup a proxy server which only allows http/https? It will be a pain for users (you'll either have to give them details of how to configure their browser to talk to the proxy or set up WPAD) but you can justify it by explaining that some people have been breaking the law and this is the result. Once you start getting "cease and desist" letters I think you're leaving yourself wide open to prosecution if you don't show that you've tried to stop this going on. Was it a film that was downloaded? I get the feeling that the big studios are checking for abuse coming from academic IPs because they know that there are often lots of people there who might be pirating stuff. We get students doing it here but because every IP is public and tracked back to the student it's pretty easy to find the guilty party and hang them publicly :-)