srochford

Not sure why this has hit the news again - it's been talked about for years! In some ways it can be seen as a not unreasonable tax; if you get free parking at work then that's effectively a benefit which probably ought to be taxed just like company cars and other benefits in kind. If you look at how much a driver would have to pay to park on the street it could easily be more than £5 per day (very much more where I work) so £250 a year is pretty reasonable (income tax on £5 a day is more than £250 per year)

That makes me feel really old :-( (and just be quiet all those at the back muttering "that's because you are really old :-))

If you value your time you really don't want to be making patch cables (and particularly if you need more than the odd one-off)

I always like the "select all the accounts and right click" type answers - I wouldn't have thought that there were many people here with an AD small enough for that to work :-) You could use the script I posted the other day at http://www.edugeek.net/forums/scripts/39363-script-populate-ad-fields.html#post366407 with a bit of modification: Set oRoot=getobject("LDAP://rootdse") sDomain=oRoot.get("defaultNamingContext") Set oConn = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") oConn.Provider = "ADsDSOOBJECT" oconn.Open sQuery = ";(&(objectClass=user)(objectcategory=person));ADsPath, sAMAccountName, displayname;subtree" Set oRS = oConn.Execute(sQuery) do While Not oRS.EOF sUser=oRS("ADSPath") sAccount=lcase(ors("sAMAccountName")) [color="Red"] if instr(sAccount,"|administrator|steve|andy|bryan|")=0 then[/color] Set oUser=getobject(sUser) [color="Red"]oUser.AccountDisabled=true[/color] oUser.setinfo end if oRS.MoveNext loop key bits in red; first checks for accounts you want to keep active (usernames in lower case or it won't work!), second disables everything else. When you're done, re-run the script but change the "true" to "false" and the accounts are re-enabled.

7 here :-) Even if you never learned any Latin, loads of English words and phrases are very similar to the Latin or we just use the Latin words (occasionally with different meanings - audio and video are a couple of quick examples)

Obviously much easier but may give a much poorer experience for the user. If users basically sit at the same machine then you can have local profiles for the user and they'll always get the same settings. For students you may want to make sure they don't get any flexibility - you're then certain that if they mess things up, log off and log on fixes it all which is good. Even with mandatory profiles you might want to look at serving them from DFS (even if it's only a single server) - makes life easier when that server gets replaced because you don't change anything in the user properties, just update the DFS location.

It depends :-) Are you all on a single subnet (single Active Directory site)? If so, then you ought to get a random server but I've seen the same server returned and I could never work out why. If you're split across multiple sites then you will get the server on the same site as you unless it's unavailable.

Which version of Word? Versions before 2007 were not very secure but 2007 is pretty secure (some details on this website - How safe is Word 2007 encryption?) What kind of data is it? Does it need to be edited? Who are you trying to stop getting hold of it? If it does need to be edited then having lots of layers is probably counter-productive - people won't bother because it's too difficult. Even if it's only going to be read then you run the risk that the user will just copy the data somewhere else. If this is a list of "in emergency" details which you don't expect to ever be read then you can safely use lots of layers as long as you've got clear docs about how to unwrap the onion :-) Finally, it may be overkill, but Windows Server 2003 Rights Management Services might be worth a look. Using this, you can specify who's allowed to open a file and, having opened it, what they can do with it (so, for example, you can open the file and read its contents on screen but you can't forward it to someone else, can't copy/paste from it and so on)

How urgently do you need to do this? The other option would be to set up DFS for your existing server and then change the users to point to that; at the moment nothing actually moves (so they're now something like \\server\profiles\username - that changes to \\domain\profiles\username) Once you've got that working, you set up a new set of folders and copy everything to it - you can do this with replication if you want but you don't need to. Once everything's copied (might do this over days, copying just what's changed) you can change DFS so \\domain\profiles now points to the new server and nothing has to change in AD so nothing has to change for the client - they will just magically find the new location.

These are our instructions for staff - Setting up Entourage 2008 for College Email Access - hopefully, you can see what would need changing for you to use it. I'd guess you could have a problem if the SSL certificate is not trusted by the machine - who is it issued by? Another way of looking at it is if you go to OWA on the Mac does it work without certificate warnings?

It's actually not that unlikely - it really can happen. There's also the risk that you're likely to be on different electrical phases in different buildings which can also lead to fun and games. It's not a huge risk; as ever, there's a need to balance the cost of putting in the fibre against the risk of not doing so.

Microsoft's web site says "Customers may not redistribute hotfixes without written, legal consent from Microsoft" (Description of the standard terminology that is used to describe Microsoft software updates for example) Assuming you have that consent, would it be wise to include a copy of it on the download page? Lots of people here may be prepared to trust your web site but it would be good to have proof that they are safe, legal downloads.

Agreed but the article referred to is saying "in schools now we don't have the latest software because it costs too much money; if we go OSS then we will have the latest software" (paraphrasing a bit!) I think that there are lots of reasons why schools (and companies, universities, etc etc) don't have the latest software and cost is just one of the factors.

This will work but note that it could add first name/last name to objects which aren't ordinary users. It checks to see if the first name or surname are already set and it also makes sure there is a space in the name but it can't cope with (eg) John Smith Jones, Jane Mary Moore or Mr J Baker. If all your pupils are under a single top level OU then you could change the line which works out sDomain so it says something like sDomain="ou=pupils, dc=schoolname,dc=county,dc=sch,dc=uk" Set oRoot=getobject("LDAP://rootdse") sDomain=oRoot.get("defaultNamingContext") Set oConn = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") oConn.Provider = "ADsDSOOBJECT" oconn.Open sQuery = ";(&(objectClass=user)(objectcategory=person));ADsPath, displayname;subtree" Set oRS = oConn.Execute(sQuery) do While Not oRS.EOF sUser=oRS("ADSPath") sDisplay=ors("displayname") iSpace=instr(sDisplay," ") if iSpace<>0 then sGivenName=left(sDisplay,iSpace-1) sSurname=mid(sDisplay,iSpace+1) Set oUser=getobject(sUser) if oUser.givenname="" and oUser.sn="" then wscript.echo "changing" oUser.GivenName=sGivenName oUser.sn=sSurname oUser.setinfo end if end if oRS.MoveNext loop

Don't think this is the problem - what @potato-peeler said is that the scripts have changed from batch files to vbscript so it's not just a case of what machine name to use but the whole language has changed!

GPO is good if you have a domain; these are standalone laptops so no domain. You can obviously use regedit or gpedit to make the changes. I'd guess the quickest way is to get a .reg file and import it to each machine.

Not sure whether your spelling mistakes were deliberate or whether it's one of those "doh" moments :-)

There's a company called Cables Direct which does a variety of sockets but will also manufacture to order - this web page Cables Direct Product Range - AV - MultiMedia Faceplates - SVGA-AUDIO-USB, Dual USB, Dual SVGA, Double SVGA with Serial, RCA and 3.5mm Socket, has some examples of what they can do.

Also check out Script Center You might want to ask your boss why he's using old fangled vbscript when he could be using nice, new shiny powershell (also at the technet script centre)

Are the new addresses contiguous with your old addresses? (eg you've given an example of: 100.100.10.1 - 100.100.13.254 and 100.100.14.1 - 100.100.17.254 if your old addresses were: 100.100.8.1 - 100.100.9.254 then the new ones just follow on and you can just change the subnet so that you're actually using 100.100.8.1 - 100.100.17.254 (use the subnet calculator posted to work out the subnet mask!) You should be able to extend your existing range to handle that. If they're not contiguous then it's a bit more work but not impossible - look at the settings for the existing range (gateway, DNS name, DNS server etc) and make a copy of that range but using your new addresses and subnet masks.

Sounds like grep then: grep "Text OK" c:\foldername\*.* > c:\temp\results.txt will search all files in c:\foldername and, if they contain "Text OK" will write their name to c:\temp\results.txt (it will do a bit more than that - you'll get the name of the file and the line containing the text. If you just want the file name you can use cut: [code] grep "Text OK" c:\foldername\*.* | cut -d : 1-2 c:\temp\results.txt cut is saying that the text input to it is delimited with : and you want to keep fields 1 and 2 (so if you have a line like C:\folder1\folder2\file.txt:Text OK then you get c:\folder1\folder2\file.txt - field 1 is the "c"; field 2 is everything else up to the next grep and cut are standard on Unix/Linux but are freely available for Windows - Browse UnxUtils Files on SourceForge.net

It's definitely worth chasing when something is within a "reasonable" lifetime but you could lose out when it's something like simada00's problem with a connector worn down - I'd guess the manufacturer could argue that this is something that wears out and 3 years is a reasonable life for it.

recordset contains the list of OUs read from the CSV file. I think the error line should read: set Domain = GetObject("LDAP://"& "ou=" & orgUnit & ",OU=Wisemore Campus,OU=Student Computers Vista,DC=walcat,DC=ac,DC=uk") I suspect the code was originally going to be: set Domain = GetObject("LDAP://"& "ou=" & recordset(0) & ",OU=Wisemore Campus,OU=Student Computers Vista,DC=walcat,DC=ac,DC=uk") but I can't quickly check this because I've got 64 bit Vista and 64 bit Windows 7 on my desk and neither works with ADO!!

I really doubt that this would happen completely even if schools were forced to move away from Microsoft or other proprietary software. There are always going to be people who want to stay with a particular version of the software - it does what they need, the new version might not do something which they want/like/need - and there's a cost to changing (even if you don't pay for the software) which can't always be justified. It would certainly be good to see software like Open Office installed in all schools - pupils should have the chance to use it. I think the best teaching will allow students to experience a range of software on a range of platforms. This helps to make students more adventurous, more able to say "why" at the right times and competition should drive forward software development in all areas.

Depends on the client, but if you're using Outlook configured to talk to Exchange with MAPI then it's not going to talk to your ASSP box. If you need to filter outbound then you need to set up Exchange to route all email via the ASSP box (there's a setting somewhere under SMTP that allows this) I'm guessing the examples you're seeing assume that users have their Outlook configured using IMAP or POP/SMTP (which is barking!) - that way you could just specify that they talk directly to the ASSP. I would hope that most people won't deliberately send spam that a spam filter will pick up so what you need to protect against is botnets etc. If you make sure that port 25 outbound through your firewall only accepts email from Exchange then you may not need to worry about outbound filtering except for messages coming from Exchange.