srochford

works fine here; what error do you get? What have you got in the file values.txt? is that file in the same location as your batch file?

There were issues with earlier versions of Windows when you had lots (>1000 I think) shares but those have now gone. From a management point of view one share is easier but clients may make a difference. Windows clients can easily connect to \\server\share\folder so if you have only got Windows clients then I'd go with that. If you've got Linux or Mac clients they're much less good at this so you really need lots of separate shares.

Excellent :-) Now when you get your new hardware up and running you can move to documents, desktop and appdata being redirected to that storage. Once that's done, your profile sizes will be quite small and you can introduce roaming profiles. Once that's done users can just move to a new machine (or a reimaged machine) and everything will follow them and life will be nice and easy :-)

You're not going to end up with elegant names, whatever you do and you're always going to get confusion because you can't just say "your username is first initial plus surname" because there are always "gotchas". When I worked in FE, we just used student ID number as the username. This is (almost always!) unique and it's easy to say to a student "just look at your ID card to get your username" (they didn't get in the building without the card)

I think this is what the term "blissful ignorance" can be used to describe :-) Actually, the more technical phrase is "DNS Island". This was a real issue for Windows 2000; I can't find definitive info to say if it was fixed in 2003 and later (I think it was) but, basically, if each server points to itself then you can get to a situation where they stop talking to each other and this is a bad thing... I'm probably teaching egg sucking but, in general, a good starting point is to ask Microsoft how they think you should configure their products. Try googling: dns "best practice" site:microsoft.com (put whatever you're interested in in place of DNS!) This won't always get what you want - some of MS guidance is not sensible in schools (full control permissions on user folders, for example) - but it makes sense to start by looking at what they say.

You're simply never going to get it - almost everything you can eat or drink could cause a problem for some people. A trivial example is peanuts; for the vast majority of the population they're completely safe but for a tiny minority they can be fatal or have very serious effects even in tiny quantities. Banning Coke Zero is probably just political - there are lots of reasons to object to the way the Coca Cola corporation behaves but it's often difficult and expensive to do anything about it. Objecting to a new product on "health" grounds is easy and probably gives the Venezuelans an easy way to get at the company.

Tax is obviously a huge part of the price paid at the pump but the increase in the price of crude oil is the main factor at the moment. A barrel of oil is about 160 litres so using the numbers posted by AngryTechnician shows that the basic price of oil has gone from $0.26 per litre to $0.45 per litre. In the same time, the exchange rate has also altered so in rough terms oil has gone from 18p to 27p a litre; the increase at the pumps is pretty much in line with this so it doesn't look like anything particularly weird is going on. As cookie_monster says, oil is a finite resource; there are arguments about how finite but it is going to run out. The sooner we can find a way of doing stuff without oil, the better our long term future!

Seems like a good idea but, sadly, "*** THIS PRODUCT HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED ***" so I'd guess we can't find out :-(

Having the wrong DNS settings can make lots of things go wrong and slow processing of group policies is one of those. The client machines should only point to your internal DNS; those DNS servers should then have forwarders configured to point to your ISPs DNS. You can use group policy to configure services to manual startup - it's in the security bit of the machine settings if I remember rightly.

It's messy but it's not impossible. if you look in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList you'll find a list of profiles; export this key to a text file. Do the same thing at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileGUID Now open these two files in notepad and keep the bit from the first file which is relevant to the account(s) you want and the same from the second file (they're linked by the SID - you'll find it easier to read the profile path when it's in regedit). You should end up with something looking like this: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileGuid\{12033caf-6bb6-4c5d-b5d2-ff37007e7acb}] "SidString"="S-1-5-21-243037206-41955558-561332275-210049" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\S-1-5-21-243037206-41955558-561332275-210049] "ProfileImagePath"=hex(2):25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,44,00,72,\ 00,69,00,76,00,65,00,25,00,5c,00,44,00,6f,00,63,00,75,00,6d,00,65,00,6e,00,\ 74,00,73,00,20,00,61,00,6e,00,64,00,20,00,53,00,65,00,74,00,74,00,69,00,6e,\ 00,67,00,73,00,5c,00,6a,00,72,00,31,00,30,00,37,00,00,00 "Sid"=hex:01,05,00,00,00,00,00,05,15,00,00,00,16,74,7c,0e,e6,30,80,02,33,40,75,\ 21,81,34,03,00 "Flags"=dword:00000000 "State"=dword:00000014 "CentralProfile"="\\\\icfs18.cc.ic.ac.uk\\jr107prof\\jr107.pds" "ProfileLoadTimeLow"=dword:f6e967de "ProfileLoadTimeHigh"=dword:01c9eb66 "Guid"="{12033caf-6bb6-4c5d-b5d2-ff37007e7acb}" "RefCount"=dword:00000001 "RunLogonScriptSync"=dword:00000001 Now save that safely for the machine. When you restore the profiles (making sure you restore permissions), import this registry file. when the user logs on they will magically get their original profile. (What you're doing is putting in the stuff which says which user gets which profile; I've never worked out why you need the profileguid bit but it doesn't seem to work if you leave it out)

Take it back to the other example - this is like the exercise books. We don't say "teachers can't have write access to the exercise books"; we absolutely expect them to write in the books when they mark them. I'm not actually saying we should allow teachers direct access to student home areas (I don't think we should!) but there are plenty of good reasons that people can come up with to justify it; it's up to techy types to offer better ways of handling things. For example, you might have some sort of submission system where a pupil can submit a piece of work which then takes it out of their folder and puts it in a teacher area. The teacher can then mark and return it. Not really sure how you'd implement it but it has to be possible :-) I think also that care needs to be taken; unless you explicitly tell pupils that people may look at the contents of their folder at any time and they should not keep anything personal in there then it's pretty unreasonable to go exploring their personal space. There are all sorts of perfectly reasonable things that a pupil might do in their own time which would be private and no-one should be accessing unless there's suspicion of wrong doing.

Would be pretty easy for MS to stick an icon on the start menu or in the programs bit of control panel which just went and fetched IE off the web - you don't need a browser installed to do that (pretty sure they can't take out BITS so that's nicely ready to do the actual transfer) If they also added options to install (say) Firefox, Safari and Chrome then they're pretty much avoiding accusations of forcing people to use IE (although I'd guess they could still have a big shiny icon for IE saying "get on the web the nice way" and grim miserable icons for the others :-))

Thanks for this; the ls -d command works (ls -ld lets me see the date which is what I most want!) I had to do the find as: find . -type d -iname "win*" -ls which worked but is really slow - it obviously scans every sub-directory. I think I should be able to stick "- prune" in to tell it not to do that but it still takes as long! Anyway, I've got what I need so many thanks again - now to get deleting :-)

In Windows I can do: dir /ad win* and I'll get a list of directories whose name starts with "win" how can I do the same in Unix? If I do ls -l win* I get the list of directories but I also get the contents of the directory and I don't want that (I'm looking at a list of home folders and want to see those which have not been used recently so I only want to see the folder details, not the contents) I've tried using find - I suspect that this will do what I want but I can't work out the switches!

I don't think you should use a drive letter - the installer process won't run as the logged on user and almost certainly won't have the drive letter available. You should be able to set it to a UNC but you do need to make sure that that is always available. The reason MS put the MSOCache folder there is that so many people got bitten by installing from a network server or CD which wasn't there when they did a repair, update, or install on 1st use. If you change its location to be (say) \\server\share\msocache then you need to make sure that "domain computers" have read access to the contents of that share.

I think this is important; it may well be that the school had an internal candidate that they thought was perfect but they brought in a couple of outsiders for comparison. The original poster says that the panel looked baffled when (s)he started talking about NAT policies, LAG groups etc - it's perfectly possible that this is why they didn't get the job! If what the panel was looking for was someone who wouldn't baffle them but could explain very technical stuff in a way that management can understand then using very technical language won't help. As others have said, you should certainly ask for a full debrief and try to get them to tell you something about what they feel you did wrong (ie why they picked another candidate) It's easy to come out of an interview thinking you did really well but in reality you're just not what the panel want (irrespective of whether there's an internal candidate)

OK. Now tried it a bit more. Trying to search for "measure river flow rate" (A Level Geography type exercise) - it appears to search for ages but returns no results (same words in Google give lots of hits instantly) Next was "crusader castles syria" - this does give a load of results but how do you use them? I can click on (say) Crac des Chevaliers and then open and I get a load of blurred RSS icons. If I persevere and scroll through them then eventually I get some blurred pictures followed by blurred wikipedia pages. I can click on those and then "open item" (why not just double click??) but nothing happens (well, actually, it tells me that it can't open the page because pop ups are blocked). Why on earth is it trying to use pop ups? Does anyone actually allow pop ups from random web sites?? Sorry; just not impressed! I suspect it would be easier to just make a page in Moodle listing half a dozen pages which are directly relevant to the topic than try and get this to work in any reasonable way. I'm afraid it's one of those things where form has completely triumphed over function and that's really not a good thing :-(

I don't want to offend, but you come across as someone for whom English is not their first language and that might be why you are struggling to get good answers to these questions. If you can find someone who can do a mock interview with you then you may find it easier to get the answers in your own words - they should be able to prompt you when you get stuck and if they know you at least a little then this will also help (there really is no point in someone else telling you what you can bring to a company!)

Probably being stupid but what's the point? I'm sure the flakiness is down to it being a test platform (just tried logging in 3 times; only 1 worked. I've made a few searches; only 2 worked and I'd have got better results using just one search engine!) Not sure if it's configurable, but the small box is a real pain - if you type more than 2 words they scroll out of site so you can't see what you've typed. Started writing this about 10 minutes ago and stopped because I couldn't get to the web site - I still can't. Don't know if this is because the test server is overloaded or if it's just fallen over. Just re-reading your original notes, why would you want to give a saved search to pupils? Surely you want to teach pupils how to search??

You can do this (and I'm pretty sure it is supported by MS) but you need to think about the amount of traffic - how much data will have to be written to the replica server? Could this trash your network and cause more problems than it solves?

I do know that - I can't believe I actually wrote such nonsense! Can I claim that my account has been hacked as a defence :-)

Are you real??? Do you know how much damage is caused by visible light?? Have you read anything about the skin cancers caused by over-exposure to visible light (sun burn anyone???)

It can be run at login but it won't delete anything - it's going to run with the rights of the logged in user and (unless you make all your users local admins) they won't be able to delete anything!

The benefit of taking the image as a backup is that you never know what's going to be needed later. Someone might say "Oh, I just need the files in folder XXX" so you get those back, wipe and reinstall and they then say "but where's YYYYY" and you find that there's a whole raft of stuff that some application saves in its own folder or under application data or whatever. If you've got an image which you can just open and browse then it's easy to fix. If you've wiped and reinstalled then it's not easy ...

imagex isn't bootable - it's just an application you can put on a bootable CD. I'd misunderstood where you were starting from - what you need to do first is get a CD which can boot Windows (or other OS for some of the other utils) and you then put imagex on that CD. If you start atUltimate Boot CD for Windows this tells you how to make a CD which will boot Windows - you also need a copy of a "real" XP CD. There are also instructions on how to add an application to it. ImageX is part of the Windows Automated Installation Kit Unfortunately, MS don't seem to have it available as a separate download which is a pain because the .exe file you need is about 1.5Mb whereas WAIK is an awful lot bigger! One benefit of downloading the whole of WAIK is that it includes Windows PE and instructions on how to make a bootable CD with it; again, you can just add the imagex.exe file to that image.