srochford

If it's only for Windows machines then look at imagex - you can run this from WinPE, BartPE or Windows if you're going to take an image of a drive in a USB caddy etc. You get a .wim file which you can put somewhere safe. You can then mount this so it appears as a folder in your filesystem. this can be read only (if you just want to extract files) or read write if you want to change stuff and then put the image back on a drive.

Ask Microsoft - they're the only people who might know (and even if they just make it up, you have a Microsoft version which should be good enough!) The person to ask is Emma Healey.

VNC will install silently from the command line so I've previously made an MSI using the MSI wrapper wizard You also need some registry settings; you can put these in with regedit /s so that's also silent (just copy the settings from a manually installed copy)

I take your point but given that no-one can find any building reg which says this, is it just possible that this is an architect type decision - ie they think grey will look nicer (matches the carpets???) and is nothing to do with safety or other building regulations! The original poster just said that the electrical contractor said the sockets must be grey but could this be because an architect has put this on the drawings for aesthetic reasons??

Do you really think there are going to be many votes for the first 3? I doubt most consultants would even answer an email for that sort of money! The last time I had any dealing with a consultant it was something like £500 - £1000 for a day.

OWA light gives only gives 1 day at a time in calendar view (which is useless!), doesn't give a tree view folder access for mail folders, doesn't give access to public folders at all, doesn't support drag and drop for email and possibly more. Other than that, it works fine :-) MS have announced that "it's fixed in the next release" but for their flagship email system to be so rubbish on anything other than IE is poor (and it's not as if you can't do this kind of thing with a web based client outside IE - Sharepoint handles this kind of thing OK in Firefox, Safari etc)

You can use the netsh command to do both the export from the old scope and the import into the new scope - no need to do copy and paste :-)

Yes. I can't think of any situation in which your technique wouldn't work (and yours is probably marginally faster; my code will have to read the disc to find out about the file) but I think parentfolder is just a bit tidier :-)

@macshinobi - that looks right; thanks. That'll teach me to try posting before my second cup of coffee :-) Slightly different version below - just uses "parentfolder" to find out the foldername set oFSO=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") on error resume next sFile=oShell.regread("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts\IbsFont") on error goto 0 if sFile="" then wscript.echo "Font not installed" else set oFile=ofso.getfile(sFile) sfolder=oFile.parentfolder wscript.echo "Font is in " & sFolder ofso.copyfolder sFolder , "c:\temp\winteg", true end if

I've not used FOG so I'm not sure how well it does multicast. The wiki says "Multicasting in FOG may require special switch configuration." which is a wonderful get out clause :-) typically, you need to look at IGMP snooping on your switches - it should be enabled to allow multicast to work well.

You have to install 2003 first and then 2007 (but you can only have 1 version of Outlook). As you suspect, 2007 will win in the extension grabbing race (although you can change this with "assoc" commands. @drperceptron mentioned using a fat install for 2007 and a virtual 2003 alongside - I'm guessing this is using Softgrid (or whatever it's called now). this is a supported MS method and works well (although you still have to choose which app should open when someone clicks a .doc file etc) Bruce - if you have SMS and have some experience with it then use it; otherwise I'd use a startup script to install it; Michael has given you an example. The stuff with updates and MSPs is a complete mess and someone at MS needs a good talking to :-) If you install from the setup.exe then any MSP in the "updates" folder will get processed; this includes any customisation file you put there as well as service packs etc. if you install using the MSI then it doesn't read any of the updates from that folder. I've no idea why someone thought that this might be a good idea!!!

The fact that fibre is already there is probably not relevant - the telecomm company will almost certainly put in new fibre. The college I used to work at was in a similar position and we upgraded. It's very easy to do because BT/Thus/Virgin do all the work for you (as long as you've physically got space to put the new end gear!) but it's not cheap. Do you know how much rental you're paying for the 2Mbit links? The ones we had were a bargain install from what was then Videotron; we paid about £1500 a year and the price never increased. When we went to 100Mbit (it was pretty much the same price as 10Mbit if I remember correctly) we had to pay about £7,000 for the install and then about the same again in annual rental. Talk to your existing telecomms company to find out what they can do. Once you've got an idea of what's technically possible you can then get your purchasing people to haggle over price (talk to all the providers) and get a good deal. To some extent, cost will depend on what infrastructure is in the street outside. If the company can just blow new fibre through existing duct then it's easy (ie cheap!); if they have to dig the street and get wayleave from all sorts of people then it's more expensive. It's also worth talking to your RSC (I'd guess it's JISC Regional Support Centre for Yorkshire & Humber) to see what they now about the local comms companies and what other colleges are doing - you won't be alone in this need!

I think this does what you want. It reads the fonts registry location and then copies everything from that folder to c:\temp\winteg It doesn't do much error checking, just a check to see if the font is installed set oFSO=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") on error resume next sFolder=oShell.regread("HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts\IbsFont") on error goto 0 if sFolder="" then wscript.echo "Font not installed" else wscript.echo "Font is in " & sFolder ofso.copyfolder sFolder , "c:\temp\winteg", true end if

What IP ranges are used on the other sites? Are they also public IPs? How many are there? Moving to a new range is hard when you have a lot of fixed IP devices (because ideally you need to change them all at the same time) but what you can do to move in the right direction is set the devices to use reserved DHCP addresses. At the moment I'm guessing that you have an exclusion range in your DHCP (eg suppose you're using 195.194.12.1 - 195.194.12.255 for your addresses then only 195.194.12.21 up are used for DHCP). You identify 2-3 devices, take their addresses out of the exclusion block and reserve them for the specific MAC addresses, configure the device to use DHCP and restart it (or restart networking on it). There are very few devices which can't be configured like this (I probably wouldn't put a DNS server on DHCP although it can be done). Once you've got everything using DHCP then you just change the scope on the server and wait for machines to request a new address. With a lease time set at 30 minutes you could make the change at (say) 4pm and it would all be working on the new addresses before 5pm Hint: Add the reservations using netsh commands and save them in a spreadsheet. When you need to change the reservations for the new scope it's really easy to just update the commands and put in new reservations. netsh dhcp server dc1 scope 192.168.1.0 addreservedip 192.168.1.10 00112233445566 machine.college.ac.uk if you put the MAC, IP and name in columns A, B and C then a formula in D will generate the code and all you have to to is update column B to get the new setup. Something I've not done but I think would work is to start preparing the new scope before you need it - you then just make the old scope inactive and the new one active at the change over time The only thing which might make this harder is if your routers to the other sites can't cope with private addresses (eg you're using public addresses on the other sites) It's not the end of the world - you just need to change them at the same time.

quite nice to the people doing the exam?? Spelling intrigues me. I'm quite good at it (but will almost certainly make a mistake here!) but many people either aren't good at it or don't bother - read almost any thread on here, for example, and you'll find it riddled with mistakes. Some will be typos but most are obviously because people just don't know the words (my pet hate is "of" instead of "have") or how to spell them. I have no idea what will happen to written English in the next few decades - I suspect it may be rather different from today. Does that matter? It's changed hugely over the centuries so perhaps not.

Isn't this an example of an oxymoron? certainly seems strange to see "learning perl" and "easy and fun" in the same sentence :-)

I'm out of touch with Sims but I'd be amazed if they were not working on a web version. Silverlight might be the way to go or just simple .Net web pages The FE college I used to work at used Agresso QL and they released a web version a few years ago. The general opinion of the people who used it was that it was too slow compared to the fat Windows client it replaced (repainting a whole web page is always going to take longer than just filling in a few boxes on a screen which is already loaded in RAM). Silverlight (or Flash or even Java) ought to improve that experience. A big benefit of using any web based app is that it runs anywhere you've got a browser and deploying a new version is really easy.

msgbox works in vbscript - you could have 1 line vbs file saying msgbox "OK" and then call that from your batch file. Pretty sure you can't do Windows messages from a command script without calling another program. You can do: pause Done which will then stop and wait for you to press a key but it's not obvious if you're not looking for it. Good luck with it all - it does eventually become really useful and (maybe!) fun :-)

No problem; just add: cscript \\server\share\mappingscript.vbs to your existing batch file. You could also do it all in a batch file if you prefer: if %computername:~0,2% == D2 net use T: \\server\share if %computername:~0,2% == D3 net use T: \\server\share if %computername:~0,2% == D4 net use T: \\server\share if %computername:~0,2% == D5 net use T: \\server\share The ~ operator does string slicing; you take the variable computername and slice it, starting at position 0 and taking 2 characters

You don't need to set up individual shares - when you create your user, you can specify the home folder as (say) \\server\home\%username% AD will then work out what the folder should be called and create it. the user will then get a home folder of \\server\home\jbloggs or whatever The time when creating separate shares is useful is if you have Macs or Linux; neither is happy "deep mapping" (ie mapping to \\server\share\folder rather than \\server\share)

The credentials is not to do with cached credentials, it's just that you can't have 2 connections to the same server using different usernames this means that you can't do: net use X: \\server1\share1 /user:steve password net use Y: \\server1\share2 /user:fredd password What restrictions do you have on connecting network drives? There's nothing wrong with the idea of your script.

Is this the full server or just Express? The Express edition doesn't install management studio but you can download it separately.

Pretty sure you can't do folder redirection with a group policy to "h:" - the folder redirection group policy gets executed before drive letters are mapped and it falls over. You should be able to make the change to the registry with a login script set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") oShell.regwrite "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal","H:\","REG_EXPAND_SZ" (NB - you should use "user shell folders" rather than "shell folders"; at some point MS will stop supporting the shell folders bit - it's a left over from pre-Windows 95!) Why not just let it redirect to the UNC? It should work for all software you have and, assuming you have your permissions right, there's nothing to lose by letting users know where their files are stored (and if your permissions aren't right then ...)

I think it ought to be a given that the day to day stuff carries on working - there should be no bonus payments for introducing (say) a new VLE if the normal stuff all falls to pieces. Do you have any kind of system to record jobs done and, more importantly, user satisfaction (as you say, there's no point having jobs logged and closed with the user ready to explode because things haven't actually been fixed). If you've got that, then showing that user satisfaction has stayed steady (or, better, increased) coupled with the introduction of something new would be a good target. The "something new" needs to be wanted - no point in saying "going to set up XYZ hardware and software" if no-one wants it. Of course, there are lots of things that no-one will ask for because they don't know they exist. This is where the project can be more interesting. Let's suppose that you don't have a VLE. You start by proposing the introduction of a VLE and you have demos of the sort of thing it can do. This then works through development, install, documentation, user acceptance testing etc etc

How is it Viglen's fault that you choose to buy under specified machines? You can buy under spec machines from anyone (and, yes, I've done it!) If they tell you they're going to deliver (say) 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo and you find they're 2GHz Celerons then fair enough Only you know what you're going to do with the machines. They might well say "school X buys 2GHz Celerons and find them OK" but unless you know that school X is doing the same as you then there's no value in taking that advice. It's similar with things like classlink - all of the management systems are less flexible than a vanilla system and you need to decide before you buy it whether it's going to be OK for you. Of course, if you come into a school after someone else has bought a product then none of that's any help but it's still not the fault of the supplier that someone else bought something which isn't suitable for what you want to do!