srochford

Look at Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. You can add startup commands to it; it would be easy to make that process run Ghost (I've never done it to restore an image from the disc but I've done it to boot a machine and make it join a multicast session)

Why not? I can't face watching the whole thing again, but what I think it says is that the number of gifted and talented children in China exceeds our total number of children. A while ago that might not have been significant - the level of education in China wasn't very high but now their brightest kids are at least as good as ours and probably better. We used to think that it didn't matter that we didn't have much in the way of industry left in the UK because we could just do "knowledge" industry instead. Now the Chinese (and Indians) can do all the traditional industry and all the technology and knowledge that we thought could keep us going. What's left for us to do now?

You might also want to look at restricted groups - it's a group policy, no scripting, no panics and easy to use :-)

You can just turn off the GPO to make the home dir available off line. Provided the users synched properly last time they logged off, they won't lost anything but there's no sensible way to check that this has happened. Is there any way you can protect network sockets so that they are kick proof? Can you use a UPS to protect the server against surges? (you probably can't protect the workstations) If the network connection does drop for less than a minute or so while users are working, most applications will recover - Windows is pretty good at reconnecting shares that it loses touch with.

I've only seen it 2 or maybe 3 times; it is good but I'd guess it does get a bit much after a while. The numbers are thought provoking but how much effect they have is hard to say. Ray Fleming made a UK version of it which is available here with some notes about it. I'd guess that it's omnipresence is down to the fact that it was released with a Creative Commons license. Could this be an example of where DRM might be a good idea :-)

I think that last bit is good - it shows you can think outside the box a bit. It's all too easy to do the "oooh, that looks expensive" but asking "How do you monitor now; have you thought about Nagios etc" or "what's your current maximum throughput?; well, there's no need in going to gigabit yet but we could make sure that the switches are configured to give best throughput" Without knowing exactly how the question was asked it's difficult to say if it's good or bad as a question. In general, though, open ended questions are good at interviews - it gives people a chance to show thinking skills and how well they can present their thoughts.

Check the permissions on the folder (probably c:\documents and settings\all users\start menu\programs) The group "users" should only have read access to that; if that's not the case then that's why they're able to delete stuff and you need to reset it. If users can only read then look at the other groups and find out which groups do have write access; make sure that normal users are not in any of those groups.

The other thing I'd do with the Automatic Updates service stopped is to delete c:\windows\windowsupdate.log - it gets huge and if you need to refer to it, it's always easier to trawl through a smaller log file.

If you need to do that then it suggests that your DNS is broken. If you do ipconfig /all at a prompt, what address do you get for your DNS? Is it the correct address for a DNS server on your network (not one external to your network). If you then type: nslookup fullnameofserver.yourdomain.name 11.22.33.44 where 11.22.33.44 is replaced by the IP you got above, what do you get? You can also use DNSLint from Microsoft to get a fuller check of the DNS settings.

7dayshop does excellent pricing for stuff like this - eg 8Gb drive for £9.99 or 16Gb for £16.50 (inc delivery)

It depends :-) If they relate to contracts (eg purchasing etc) then you may need to keep them (but finance people tend to just print and file everything!) You may need to keep stuff in case of disciplinary or grievance procedures - if someone says "I told person X on numerous occasions that they should/shouldn't do Y" then email proof is important. You may need to keep stuff because someone makes a Freedom of Information request and it would be reasonable for you to have that information (unless you have an enforced policy which says "all email is deleted after 1 year") The key thing is that you must have a policy which is agreed on and reasonable steps are taken to enforce that policy. Incidentally, those who are squirelling away copies of all email need to make extremely sure that access to that mail is very tightly controlled.

Or they could just sniff the traffic using wireshark, find a MAC address which does work and set their MAC address to match. Quite a few network card drivers allow you to specify the MAC address you want to use (eg my laptop has a Broadcom and there's a simple option in Windows to just enter an address) A few things I can think of; 802.1x authentication on your switches could block access (it might take time to set up but if you already have a Radius server it's probably not too hard). If you can specify times on the proxy server when certain users are allowed then that might be an easy way (ISA does this which doesn't help; pretty sure you can do it with Squid)

Just remember to do "unload hive" when you've finished - this saves the changes and cleanly closes the file. If you still have problems then try running procexp (sysinternals) to find out what process is holding the file open.

So long since I used one but I'm wondering if it's case sensitive. Can you try: *HELP When it first switches on it will say something like "BBC B 32k" at the top and under that should be a list of installed ROMs (perhaps just one) - what does it say??

Might be clutching at straws/barking up the wrong tree here but if the MSI is failing, is that because you're starting the msiexec process as "you" but that then gets passed to the installer service which I think then runs in the context of the local machine account. Do "domain computers" have read access to the relevant share? This could be a red herring because the copy doesn't work (but that "-s" at the end will cause problems, I think)

Sorry; should have made that clearer! type * form 80 0 to format disc 0 I'm assuming the machine has Acorn DFS; if it doesn't then the command might be different. Can you type: *help - this will give you a list of the ROMs installed in the machine. I think pretty much all BBC Bs had the connectors for the disc drive but not all had the actual disc controller and DFS (disc filing system) ROM

We run Safecom; it works. I've previously used Equitrac. That didn't do follow me printing (not sure if it could have done) and it also worked well.

I don't suppose they expect to make much money from the toilet idea but given that most Ryanair flights are short I suspect that if they can stop people using the toilets then they save money (they presumably have to empty the toilets at the airport and pay for that to be done; any saving of time or money will be worthwhile to them) Fitting the satellite receiver etc will cost quite a bit but that will really bring in money - I can see an awful lot of people will make calls on a plane just because they can, even if it costs (say) £5 per minute! Ryanair is a profitable company because they use every means they can to get every last penny out of their customers. If you don't like the way they work then just don't use them!

Accidents will happen and this is why someone should do a risk assessment about the likelihood of it happening and the harm it would cause if it did happen. Dropping something heavy on your toe could cause serious damage but my assessment is that it's unlikely (in nearly 30 years in IT I've never seen it happen). Obviously, other establishments may be more hazardous. I'd guess I'm just glad I don't work there :-)

I also like clonezilla. You can use it either to do one machine at a time (copying image from DVD or network share) or doing many images with multicast. Just before I left my last job we reimaged about 600 machines with Linux (we donated them to various charities) and did them in batches of up to about 40 at a time using a fairly low spec (2GHz Celeron) machine as "server" Web site is here - click the server edition link in the left side menu to get more info. Key thing for people (like me!) who find it hard to remember the arcane commands etc that packages like this use is to document them - all good IT departments will have a wiki or similar in which to keep stuff like this. Even if there's only one of you it's really useful to have notes of what you did last time so that you don't keep reinventing the wheel!

I'd agree with using robocopy instead of xcopy. The newer versions of xcopy have more useful bits but robocopy is still streets ahead! If you need to stay with xcopy then add the /c switch - this continues if there's an error (what I suspect is happening is that it's somehow trying to download the linked to web site which could take a while and will fill your disc ...) With robocopy, I would add /mir /sec /w:1 /r:1 /b /np /log:c:\temp\copy.log switches (mirror from source to destination; copy security; wait 1 second if an error occurs; retry once only; run in backup mode; don't show progress per file; write a log)

I'm intrigued! What on earth are you doing that needs safety footwear? The only time I've ever put boots like that on at work was when I was going on to the new buildings and they were still live building sites! I can't imagine any normal IT work that needs gear like that :-)

The 2Mb to 10Mb upgrade isn't available yet so the call centres won't know about it yet. One of the things Virgin have been advertising recently is that all their deals are for all customers - not just new ones. Sadly, I now can't find that but I'm sure that the point was that there might be "first 3 months half price" type offers but once that was over, the price new customers pay is the same as the price existing customers pay. I'd call back and try and speak to someone else or write to them specifically making the point that you ought to get the same deal as a new customer.

Almost feel like doing a "let me google that for you" but actually, I've already typed the answer just a few lines above ...

Script below should work - comment out the "oUser.setinfo" bit the first time you run it and it will just create a log showing what it's going to do. If that looks OK then re-rerun with with the setinfo line included. Don't have an AD handy to try this on but it's based on various scripts I've used which do "something" to every user so I'm reasonably confident :-) Set oRootDSE = GetObject("LDAP://RootDSE") sDomain = oRootDSE.Get("defaultNamingContext") Set oFSO=wscript.createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") sLogPath = "c:\temp\change" & right(year(date),2) & right("00" & month(date),2) & right("00" & day(date),2) & ".log" Set sLogFile = oFSO.opentextfile(sLogPath, 2, True) '2 is writing sLogFile.Close WriteLog "Started" Set oConn = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") oConn.Provider = "ADsDSOObject" oConn.Open Set oCommand = CreateObject("ADODB.Command") oCommand.ActiveConnection = oConn oCommand.properties("Page Size")=100 ocommand.CommandText = ";(objectCategory=person);sAMAccountName;subTree" Set oRS = oCommand.Execute iCount=1 Do While Not oRS.EOF sUsername=trim(oRS("sAMAccountName")) sDN=oRS("distinguishedname") set oUser=getobject("LDAP://" & sDN) wscript.echo sUsername iDashPos=instr(sUsername,"-") if iDashPos<>0 then sSurname=mid(sUsername,3,iDashPos-1) sGivenName=mid(sUsername,iDashPos+1) oUser.sn=sSurname oUser.givenname=sGivenName writelog "Updating " & sUsername to " & sGivenName & " " & sSurname oUser.setinfo else writelog "Can't find a dash in " & sUsername end if oRS.MoveNext Loop writelog "Ended" Sub WriteLog(sToWrite) Set sLogFile = oFSO.opentextfile(sLogPath, 8) '8 is append sLogFile.write Date & " " & Time & ": " & sToWrite & vbCrLf sLogFile.Close End Sub